


Wings 'n' Things

by snibnoom



Series: Classified Existence [2]
Category: ASTRO (Band)
Genre: M/M, Some angst, but they're there, i promise there is a happy ending, ships aren't the focus, the start of socky shows up too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-17 00:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11264703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snibnoom/pseuds/snibnoom
Summary: Finding out that there's a secret world surrounding the one you already know can be disorienting.  Finding out that you're the reason for the start of a revolution in this secret world is something even harder to comprehend.





	1. Tiny People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is with these bugs?

Sanha does not enjoy high school. In middle school, he had been so excited. Here he is, attending one of the top performing arts academies in the world, and Sanha isn’t satisfied. The music program is phenomenal, of course; he loves the music program. High school homework, however, is Sanha’s mortal enemy. It teases him, mocks him, and takes away a large majority of any free time Sanha is left after his regular school day, his guitar lessons, and his language lessons. Sanha hasn’t played any video games in three whole weeks because he spends three-fourths of his free time on homework. He has a few close friends, like Jaemin and Hyeyeon, but he doesn’t get to spend much time with them because of his homework. Sanha is lucky if he gets a few words out to his friends in or between classes, because even those times he spends working on homework.

In the last year or so that Sanha had been in high school, he has also gotten really good at procrastinating. Sanha finds it easier to procrastinate than actually do something, so he had taken up bike riding as his favorite form of procrastination. It keeps him in shape with minimal effort, he gets to explore his neighborhood, _and_ it gets him out of the house away from his responsibilities.

Fifteen minutes ago, Sanha had swung his leg over his bike and took off down the street. His mother had stood on the porch yelling for him to be careful as Sanha shoved his earbuds in and turned up his music. Their neighborhood is easy to navigate, so Sanha isn’t too worried about getting lost. Left turn, right turn, right turn, left turn. Sanha suddenly realizes that the sun is beginning to set. Multitasking—looking at his phone while also driving his bike—is too hard. Sanha guesses that it’s about half past five. If he spends another good ten minutes riding, he would be able to get home with enough time to do his homework. Teachers had said it would take only an hour, but Sanha works a bit slower than the normal for other students. Maybe he could stay out until dark and then take a long shower. If he put off his homework for long enough, then it wouldn’t be a problem. That’s how it works, right? Frowning, Sanha watches the front tire of his bike as he rides. If he was being honest with himself, now would probably be a good time to start home. However, the dragonfly that had alighted on his bike handle was more interesting.

Sanha pulls his bike onto the side of the road, stopping just barely out of the reach of cars. Do dragonflies normally land on moving bikes? He doesn’t think they do. Sanha tugs out his headphones and taps quickly on his phone screen, opening his camera. When he aims his phone at the dragonfly, there isn’t a dragonfly on his screen. Instead, a little human with golden, oblong wings is perched in its place. Sanha jerks his phone away and loses his footing, stumbling slightly. He jostles his bike in the process and the tiny person takes flight.

Would staring at a three-inch-tall person with gold wings be considered rude? Sanha can’t help it. How did they get so small? It has to be stress, right? Sanha is definitely stressed because of his homework. He is procrastinating, and this is probably his brain telling him to get back on track. The last thing he needs is hallucinations, and the last thing he expects is a minuscule, high pitched voice.  
“Ayho,” the small voice says, and Sanha doesn’t know if he had heard correctly. That was definitely not a normal way to speak. Goldy flies upwards a few inches, and away from Sanha’s face. When the words come again, Sanha hears them clearly.

“Hello. Do you understand me?”

Sanha’s brows pull together. There is now a tiny human with golden, oblong wings in place of a dragonfly and it is speaking. Slowly, Sanha nods. Is he crazy? Why is there a little person speaking to him?

“What’s your name, mun?” Sanha hears, and he hesitates. A second tiny person joins the first, large blue wings spreading behind their compact body. This one is taller than the other, about five inches tall compared to the three inches of the other.

“U-um, San—” Sanha stops, caught off guard as two more miniature people join the fray. “San,” Sanha starts again. Before he can get his name out, something pelts his shoulder. He gasps, reaching to his right shoulder with his left hand. Feeling around, he thinks there is a welt growing under his shirt. Is the fabric hot? The same sting strikes his hand. Upon inspection, Sanha sees a pink spot that begins to widen the longer he looks at it.

“Uncanny,” Blue says, their voice ringing. Sanha watches as Goldy nods, and the other two fairies behind nod in agreement as well.

“What’s uncanny?” Sanha asks. “The real thing that’s uncanny is that I’m hallucinating and seeing tiny people right now.” He doesn’t really understand the meaning of uncanny, but he uses the word anyway.

There is tittering laughter following his comment, each of the tiny people covering their mouths. Sanha realizes that they weren’t really wearing clothing. Is leotard the right word for it? It covers them from calves to neck, and Sanha thinks that maybe it was blended with each of their skin and the colors of their wings. This is his tipping point. Sanha is paying attention to the tiny details of the tiny people that are engulfing his full attention in his odd hallucination.

“So peculiar,” Goldy says. “How is it that Fae did not find you, Yoon, until now? We cannot let you traverse the globe with sights like these tainting your foul mind.”

It doesn’t take a translator to understand the threat behind those words. Sanha hoists himself onto the seat of his bike and pushes off. The bike feels harder to get going than usual. Pumping his legs, Sanha rides hard and fast like his life depends on it. His life quite possibly does depend on outriding these small humans with wings who suddenly seem very, very angry with him. No matter how fast he rides, though, they don't seem to get any further away. Sanha doesn't dare look back for fear of losing his direction going forward, but he can hear their snickering and teasing and he knows that there were more of them now than there had been earlier. Why does the sound of such insignificant wings hold so much meaning? He can't get away from them fast enough.

And then there is one holding onto his shirt sleeve.

Sanha yelps, swatting at it, his bike swerving into the main road. A car horn blares but the winged humans don't stop their pursuit. A second one grasps the back of his hand and Sanha raises it, shaking it to dislodge the person. That does nothing but anger them. The stinging feeling returns and a pink spot begins spreading on Sanha’s hand again. His other hand is already covered, the color working its way up his arm. What is this? Poison? A skin disease? A poisonous skin disease? Several more of the small people have caught up and they start picking at his arms. Sanha raises them, waving his arms, losing control of his bicycle. As he tries to correct his path, he realizes his fate too late. He crashes into the side of a black sedan, falling to the ground with a shout. Tiny hands are on him as tiny wings flap and tiny zings of electricity shock his body. It won't be long now before his entire body has turned pink with this poisonous skin disease.

There is a shout from behind him, and suddenly a young man runs out into the street. He waves his arms, swinging them quite wildly, really. “Dumb bugs,” the man cries. “Ah, shoo! What is _with_ the bugs this year?”

Sanha stays pressed against the side of the sedan, his legs tangled up in his bike. The man looks like any other man, though maybe a little short. Broad shoulders are covered by a green shirt, and the legs of the stranger’s pants are rolled up several times. Sanha watches as the tiny people fly away from him, and the less he focuses, the less they look like little humans with wings. That’s crazy. What had made him believe that what he saw was really that? This stranger in the green shirt obviously didn’t see what Sanha did.

Green Stranger squats beside Sanha once the bugs had all gone away. “Are you alright?” he asks. He grabs Sanha’s wrist, inspecting the pink that covers the lower part of his arm now. “Aw, man. They got to you. I was really hoping they wouldn’t.”

“They? The bugs?” Sanha says. His mind is spinning. Why does this stranger look so concerned over the pink tone of his skin? Doesn’t his skin always look a little pink like this?

Sanha gets a very specific look from Green Stranger, who then looks away. It’s hard not to stare at someone when they are so close. Sanha notices that Green Stranger has a freckle under their bottom lip and there is another one on their cheek. Green Stranger looks him in the eyes again suddenly. Reflex makes Sanha jerk his head back, hitting his head against the black sedan.

“Hey, hey, careful,” Green Stranger says. “We need to get you untangled, alright? Pick up your left leg.”  
Sanha follows instructions. It takes a minute, but he is free from his bike. Green Stranger doesn’t say anything other than telling Sanha where to move his legs to get him out from under his bike. He continues to stay silent when loading Sanha’s bike into the trunk of the black sedan.

“T-that’s my bike,” Sanha stammers. “I know you helped me, but you can’t just take my bike. I need to get back hom-”

Green Stranger presses a thumb to his forehead and swiped it across his skin. Sanha recoils from the sudden contact. He stumbles as his vision starts to blur.

“H-hey. What w-was tha-” It is hard for Sanha to see anything at all. He wobbles on his feet and leans against the sedan. What color was it? Sanha can’t see it, and he can’t remember, either. Why is there a sedan? Sanha had been riding his bike, and then he had stopped to take a photo of a dragonfly. Where is the dragonfly? Had he gotten a good photo? Thinking of photos, where is his phone? He should probably call his mother and tell her that he would be home soon.

Yeah, he would be home soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written by Admin M at astrofantastic.tumblr.com (also at snibnoom.tumblr.com)


	2. Imprisoners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sanha's only chance for survival is to make his escape.

Sanha is vaguely aware of the fact that he can’t see anything. Why can’t he see anything? It’s hard to remember. Is there something about a dragonfly? He can also hear voices. They seem distant, or like he is listening from underwater. Very few words float to him clearly. “Kid” and “angry” and “ignored” are some of the words he deciphers quickest. His vision begins to clear, very slowly, and his hearing gets better. Sanha picks up short phrases now; he hears “king will want” and “how this happened” and “questions to answer.” What is this guy talking about? It’s a man’s voice, not his father’s or one of his brother’s. Sanha shifts slightly, blinks, and he can make out shapes and shadows moving around. Had he heard a name? Oberon? That isn’t any name he had heard before. It doesn’t sound like a normal name at all.

There are footsteps shuffling and while Sanha could only make out shadows of people, he can now hear them much better. They are just a few feet away, after all. There’s some rattling and the clanking sound of metal against metal. Where is he? Is this a hospital?

“You know,” a voice says, “Oberon is going to want to know why we’re harboring an enemy of the Fae.”

“He shouldn’t be an enemy,” a second voice says. “It isn’t his fault. He’s just a kid, and he was an even younger kid when he would’ve become Fairy Struck. Honestly, these fairies just need to keep to themselves like they’re supposed to. We have an agreement in this part of the world.”

“Yeah, well, he breaks that agreement.”

“Do you think he had a say so in becoming Fairy Struck? He probably doesn’t even know what Fairy Struck means, and he probably thinks fairies are just a myth.”

A hand lifts Sanha’s arm. His instincts want him to jerk his arm out of the hand holding it, but his body disobeys what his brain tells him to do. Who are these guys? Why are they talking about fairies, and why are they talking about him like he can’t hear?

“I can hear you,” Sanha say. Or he tries to say it. The only thing he manages to do is make a short groaning sound.

“That spell is supposed to leave him basically just a shell, right? He shouldn’t remember any of this?” That’s the first voice speaking again. What did he say? A spell? Magic isn’t real, either. Where had he been taken? These people sound crazy. Sanha wants to leave. Sanha wants to go home. Sanha, as much as he tries to move and run, can’t move at all.

“Yeah, it should’ve wiped his memory from about the previous five minutes of until he met me. He’ll probably remember seeing a dragonfly, but I doubt he’ll remember much else after that. The brain has a way of dispelling encounters with things of fantasy that we’re programmed to not believe anyway. In twenty-four hours, we can drop him off at the nearest police station ‘nd let them take him back home.”

Sanha can remember just fine what he had seen. He remembers most of it, at least. Roughly fifteen minutes into his bike ride, a dragonfly had landed on his bicycle. He hadn’t seen a dragonfly, though, he had seen a tiny human with tiny wings. They had been gold, hadn’t they? Sanha thought they were gold. His hallucination had just gotten weirder from there. Oh! What about his arms, and his shoulder? Are they still pink? Maybe that weird skin rash hadn’t been poisonous after all. He isn’t dead, at least. Does he still have arms? He can feel them even if he can’t move them. What if they’re phantom arms? Sanha looks from side to side with his eyes, since his head still isn’t obeying him. One of the men standing near him looks tall. His right arm is still being held, but by a shorter man.

“His eyes move an awful lot for being in the situation he’s in,” the first voice comments. Sanha points his eyes in the direction of the voice, to his left. “It’s like he’s staring right at me. Look, that’s so creepy. Jinwoo, are you sure this is normal?”

“Probably just a reflex,” the second voice responds. So this second voice is Jinwoo. Is that it? Sanha doesn’t care. He needs to get out of here. Sanha needs to get out and run away before they put a tracker under the skin behind his ear. They would probably let him go home and think everything was normal, and then he would get picked up by them again in a month or two. They would make him do awful, illegal things, but since he was a child, he would get off easy with the law once he got caught.

“Just wrap his arms, would you?” Jinwoo says. Sanha’s arm is released. “I need to go see how Minhyuk is doing with tracking where those fairies came from. The best thing we can hope for is that they aren’t Oberon’s.”

Footsteps retreat. Sanha stays still. Can he move at all yet? He bends his index finger, and it does feel a lot like it moves. Blinking doesn’t seem to be clearing his vision as quickly as he would’ve liked. A warm hand touches his arm and lifts it, and Sanha bends his finger again.

“Ah!” the man of the first voice shouts. “Seriously. Jinwoo better not be lying to me. These better be your actual reflexes, kid.” He lowers his voice. “So creepy.”

I’d like to kick you, then you can tell me that I’m creepy all you want, Sanha thinks He blinks his eyes as rapidly as his body will let him, which isn’t very fast at all. A cold metal circle presses against the inside of his arm. It’s the measuring end of a stethoscope, maybe? His arm is released at it falls back into its normal place. There is some shuffling, and then something that feels like gel touches his arm. Every instinct in Sanha’s body recoils, but his body doesn’t move at all. He blinks, hard, and his vision clears more than it had before. The man standing in front of him looks a little shorter than he is, though it’s hard to judge from his seated position. Is he wearing glasses? A cart like the kind found at hospitals is beside the stranger. Sanha can’t see shapes more than a few feet away. It gets too blurry past there. He blinks hard again.

The man _is_ wearing glasses. They are an odd shape, but it suits his attractive face. Of course Sanha thinks this man is attractive, but it’s only from an objective standpoint. This man is one of his captors. He can not let himself get weak to them just because they look friendly. Glasses is very focused on the job at hand, almost seeming to be concentrating too hard. Sanha flicks his finger outward and Glasses jumps, swearing. The tension in his voice almost makes Sanha want to laugh. He can’t, though. His body still isn’t cooperating. Sanha blinks fast, and his body lets him this time. With each blink, his vision gets clearer. He can see about as far as he could when he’s wearing his contacts, which meant that he still has his contacts in. That, at least, is a good sign. Glasses wipes his hands on a towel and grabs gauze from the small rolling table beside him. Sanha has to hold still as his arm is wrapped. It doesn’t take long for the gauze to cover him from elbow to wrist, and even then Glasses continues and wraps the gauze around most of his hand. At least Glasses knows not to cut off his circulation with it. The school nurse didn’t do this good of a job with gauze. Minutes later, and Sanha’s right arm has been covered in gel and wrapped just like his left arm. Glasses pushes the cart away as he leaves, and Sanha dares to bend his head.  
Surprisingly, his body listens. Sanha is seated on a stool. He realizes that his shoes are missing. The others sounded like they had been wearing shoes, so where are Sanha’s shoes? It takes concentration, but Sanha is able to straighten his leg out in front of him. His eyes watch Glasses as he recedes. As soon as he is out of sight, Sanha stands up. Weak legs barely support him, but Sanha starts walking anyway. His sock covered feet makes no noise as he walks.

The room that Glasses had walked into has windows on the outer walls. Sanha ducks as he approaches it and he is walking in his squatted position as he gets as close as possible. He puts himself between a large shelf and a desk. Words are already spilling out from inside.

“Humans always have to get themselves into messes.” Is this person really separating himself from humans? His raspy voice sounds very displeased with whatever they are discussing.

“Hey, you did, too!” This voice is higher pitched than most voices Sanha hears coming from men. It has a musical quality, as if his voice is meant to be singing. “Now you’re stuck like this for the rest of your blood-sucking life.”

“At least I’m honest about my past. You won’t tell us anything about you.”

“Bin, stop.” That voice belongs to Glasses. “You know not to go there.”

“No, I want to know why he won’t tell us anything.” This Bin guy sounds like a real jerk, Sanha thinks.

“That’s enough.”

Sanha freezes. This powerful voice belongs to the second man who had been at the stool with Glasses, Jinwoo. Blinds cover most of the windows on the wall. It’s risky, but Sanha can spare no chances now. The best idea is to get a look at who his imprisoners are. He peeks his head up, staying as close to the bottom of the window as he can. The voice continues, and he quickly realizes that Jinwoo is the Green Stranger that had helped him get away from the bugs. Is he the reason that Sanha is here?

“Now,” Jinwoo said. “What do you think we should do with the kid?”

“I say we follow our normal plan,” Bin says. Sanha’s eyes flit across the room to the owner of the raspy voice that had spoke like he wasn’t human. His muscles obviously can’t be contained by a shirt. Are muscles like that human? Sanha isn’t sure.

“Well, he isn’t exactly a _normal_ kid,” Glasses interjects. “If he really is Fairy Struck like Jinwoo says, then we need to be careful going about this. Once Minhyuk knows if the fairies were Oberon’s or Marwig’s, we can take action. Until then, I say we keep him here.”

“What about when the spell wears off?” Sanha locates the owner of the high pitched voice. The man is short, as short as Jinwoo, and dressed in a wildly patterned shirt.

“Jinwoo can just keep doing the spell every 24 hours,” Glasses says. “That would be fine, wouldn’t it?”

Jinwoo shakes his head, his hair wiggling over his forehead. He looks like he needs a haircut. “The spell, when used for more than 48 hours, could cause irreversible memory damage. That’s how much time we have to figure this out. Less than that, even, because he’s already been here for a few hours.”

Sanha has already been here for a few hours? He needs to find a way out, _now_. It is probably dark out. His mom is probably worried. If Sanha can find his way out and get to a person, any person, he can make a phone call to his mom. People would help a lost teenager, right? Sanha shrinks down, pats his pockets. His phone is missing. He would need to know what these criminals looked like so he could give a description to the police when he went to the police station later.

They are still talking, but Sanha doesn’t care about what. He looks at Jinwoo. He is short, and when they had been standing outside by that black sedan, he had been tall enough to reach Sanha’s eyes at least. Sanha hasn’t realized it before, but Jinwoo’s hair was dyed a light shade of brown. The young man talking now is Glasses, and Sanha is certain that he would never forget a face like his. Beside Glasses stands the one that he had called Bin. Large muscles, barely shorter than Glasses, and Sanha waits a moment to see if Bin would turn so he can get a better look at him but the only view he gets was of his profile. The other short man in the room has dark hair and a thin build, or Sanha guesses he does. His frame is mostly hidden by the large shirt he wears. Sanha thinks that the shirt probably doesn’t belong to him. He is short, like Jinwoo is. None of them had said his name, but Sanha has learned that this man in the patterned shirt has a hidden past. That makes him the most dangerous one out of all of them, aside from maybe Bin, whose muscles are seriously terrifying. The final boy in the room doesn’t look much older than Sanha. He is seated behind a computer, barely paying attention to the others who are carrying on their conversation. His hair is dyed a deep red color, but Sanha can’t tell much more about him. Sanha backs away from the windowed room and surveys the rest of the room.

All the walls are the same brick and the floor looks like old wooden panels. Sanha notices that a few of them arere sticking up from the floor slightly, warped due to time and maybe water damage. The boards probably creaked. As he stays in his crouch, Sanha makes his way along the wall. There is an archway leading into a well-furnished living area. Windows are absent, so Sanha thinks that he is for sure underground somewhere. How far underground is he? Ignoring the living room, Sanha continues to crouch, staying near the wall and moving fast when he needs to get from one item of cover to the other. He can feel his heart pounding against his chest and the feeling in his stomach reminds him of the flurry of wings that had chased him when he was on his bike.

Sanha makes it safely to a hallway. The same brick walls and wood floors continued here. Several doors interrupt the long walls, and there is a right turn at the opposite end. He looks into the room he had come from and the five men still occupy the windowed room. Sanha turns the corner, entering the hallway, and stands up. His leg twitches as he stretched out. Any one of these doors could hide an exit. How much time does he have before those crazy criminals realize he isn’t sitting on the stool anymore? They had left him unguarded, so they probably figured that this “spell” was really supposed to work. Sanha pushes open the first door he comes to, on the left wall. He needs to explore this place as quickly as he can.

This is obviously a training room. There is a large mat on the floor like the kind that stunt doubles would land on. Wooden sticks line the wall. Some of them have the shape of swords, some are like the regular sticks he had used in his stick fighting classes. There are a couple of treadmills and weight machines. The furthest wall Sanha can see is covered from floor to ceiling in mirrors. He backs out of the room and continues down the hall. Before he can make a choice out of the following doors, he hears someone’s voice. Is it Bin that had spoken? Sanha thinks it might’ve been.

“Hey, where did he go? You left him over there, didn’t you?”

Sanha runs. He picks the closest door and steps inside, closing it behind himself as quietly as he can. Leaning against the door, he can’t make out any of what is being said. If he can’t get out of here, then maybe he can at least find out more about them. Sanha pulls the door open slightly. His entire body tenses as it creaks.

“Jinwoo, I thought you said the spell is supposed to keep him in a shell state. He shouldn’t have any motor functions. He should essentially be a dummy.”

“I did say that, and it is supposed to do that. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Unless—”

“We should stick together. You said you thought this kid is Fairy Struck, right? He could be something else, something that can resist magic.”

“The only creatures that can resist magic are elementals, and this kid is not an elemental. They have a very specific look.”

“Let’s go this way first. He’s probably looking for the way out. The only other room from the main room is the living room. I doubt he went through there to the kitchen.”

Sanha shuts the door and thanks whoever there is looking over him that the door doesn’t squeak as it closes. He presses his back against the door and looks around the room. Is there a weapon here? The best bet Sanha has is finding a weapon. He locks the door and walks away.

This is a rather large bedroom. There are beams stretching from the ground up to almost the ceiling, sectioning the room. The bed frames don’t match. In fact, the one closer to him is just two mattresses stacked on top of each other, dressed with sheets and a deep blue blanket. Sanha walks to the further bed and looks underneath. There are folders tucked into the space. Dust covers them and pink and green sticky notes stick out from the edges. Sanha’s attention on the folders evaporates as he decides that these cannot be used as a weapon. He gets up and walks around. A small cooler sits at the foot of the stacked mattresses. Well, Sanha _is_ thirsty. He pries the top open and is frozen when he sees the contents.

The lock on the door gets stuck, so it takes Sanha a moment longer to get out of the room than he would’ve liked. What is this place? Is it an experimentation facility? Do these guys work for the government? Why would you keep that in a bedroom? All of these guys have to be insane. They need medical attention. Sanha would, too, if he gets out of here alive. He would need therapy for years and years so he could get over this.

As Sanha runs into the hallway, he comes face to face with his captors. They all look strange to him. Maybe they are government experiments that are catching and kidnapping teenagers for the government to experiment on. Maybe they are the normal ones, and maybe Sanha is the crazy one. Is he still hallucinating? Sanha stands his ground and put his fists up. Glasses raises his hands, palms outward, a sign of surrender. Slowly, Sanha works his way around them. They turn as he does until their positions are reversed. At least now, if Sanha had to run, he could run into an area that he had already been in instead of running into an area he had never seen before.

“Hey.. Was he just in my room?”

When Bin speaks, it causes comments from the others too. Sanha’s eyes fly from one of them to the other, trying to keep track of who is speaking. There are too many of them, and their words blend together.

“How much do you think he saw?”

“He could’ve been faking it, you know. Sitting on the stool like that, anybody can do that.”

“Do you think he’s hurt?”

“Seriously, can we just call Jihun and the others? This is ridiculous.”

“Are we sure he’s Fairy Struck?”

“Jihun and the rest of them are out of the country, you know that.”

“Well, he was affected by that spell for a little while.”

Sanha doesn’t want to listen to them anymore. Too many voices are talking and too many things he doesn’t understand are being said. He turns on his toes and dashes towards the room he thinks is a training room. There are sticks lining the walls here, sticks just like the ones he had used before in his classes. Sanha picks the closest one and holds it in both hands, spinning around and directing it at the five men who had crowded the door into the training room. The five of them freeze in their spots. Finally, Sanha has the upper hand of the situation.

“Okay,” Sanha begins, his voice as firm as he can make it. “You’re going to tell me where I am and who you are. Nobody makes a move, or I’ll—” What would he do? “I’ll—”

“This is ridiculous,” one of them murmurs.

“I’ll whack you!” Sanha shouts, brandishing the stick. “I can take an arm off with this thing! I know judo!”

The faces of the men look somber, though Sanha thinks that Bin looks a bit annoyed. He would be the hardest one to get away from when Sanha made his escape. Muscles like that would catch him, and Sanha figures he could run fast too. At the very least, they have fallen quiet.

“Start talking,” Sanha says. “One of you.” He jabs the stick in Jinwoo’s direction. “You. Answer my question.”

Jinwoo nods, his hands halfway lifted into the position of surrender that Glasses has been holding this whole time. “Anything. What do you want to know?”

Sanha looks them all over. He has a lot of questions, but there is one question in his head screaming louder than the rest of them.

“Why does the cooler in that bedroom have bags of blood in it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're interested in being a proofreader for this fic, please send me a message @snibnoom on Tumblr or Twitter (though I'll probably reply sooner on Tumblr)


	3. Fairies Are Real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe Sanha believes these weirdos. Maybe.

There is silence after Sanha’s question. He catches Glasses bumping his arm against Jinwoo. The expression of the man in the patterned shirt goes from casual to nervous. Bin folds his arms across his chest, his already thin lips pretty much disappearing as his mouth tightens into a flat line. Sanha holds his ground. No normal group of people would just keep a cooler full of bagged blood for no reason. There is a reason, and Sanha knows it is probably a weird one.

“It’s for transfusions,” Jinwoo says after the long moment passes. “In case someone gets hurt. Our cooler got broken, so it’s there.”

Sanha squints at Jinwoo. He isn’t sure if he believes him. Why would they need blood for transfusions? Why would they be getting hurt enough to need transfusions? Sanha has a fleeting thought; maybe these guys are part of the military.

“Where are we?” Sanha asks next. Is he still in Seoul? Jinwoo said he had been out for a few hours already, meaning he technically could be hours away from Seoul.

“A basement.”

Sanha sighs, his head reflexively leaning to the left in disappointment. “Yeah, _obviously_. I meant where is the basement?”

“That’s classified.”

Sanha looks Jinwoo over. That answer had come quicker than any of the others. Why is their location classified? Maybe these guys are legitimate criminals who had legitimately kidnapped him. “Do you work for the government?”

“Uh,” Jinwoo starts, and Sanha feels that he is on to something. “The government doesn’t know we exist.”

His eyes narrow as he sees the boy who had been sitting at the computer elbow Jinwoo. That’s suspicious. Sanha will continue that line of questions in a moment. “Why were you talking about fairies and spells? Those things aren’t real. Are you crazy?”

“They’re code names.”

“What’s ‘fairy’ code name for?”

“A gang.”

“What about ‘spells,’ huh?”

“Uh, drugs.”

“You said you used a spell on me, I heard you.” Realization hits Sanha. “Did you drug me?” Sanha jabs the stick at the five people standing opposite to him. “Did you? What kind of-”

“We didn’t drug you, not exactly,” Jinwoo say, his voice calm but guarded.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly?’ It’s a yes or no question. Did you or did you not-”

There is an exasperated sigh from one of them, and it takes Sanha a moment to realize that Bin is shifting his weight from foot to foot, restless. “This is getting ridiculous,” Bin says, unfolding his arms that had been folded up until now. “Hey.” He pats Computer Boy’s arm. “Can’t you take care of this already?”

Computer Boy nods quietly. Sanha grips the wooden stick in his hands tighter and adjusts his stance to be as solid as it could be. He watches in anticipation as Computer Boy raises a hand, and the stick flies out of his hands and toward the other.

Sanha had _not_ thrown that stick.

“What was that?” Sanha yells backing away from the others. He looks at them wildly. Pointing at Jinwoo, he shakes his head. “You lied! You _did_ drug me! I’m hallucinating again!”

The others all start talking at once. He paid attention to Glasses, who said “Well, there goes the plan of keeping him in the dark.” 

Patterned Shirt beside him gives him a very direct look. “Did you really think we would be able to keep him in the dark? Those fairies probably weren’t Oberon’s, and you know it.”

Sanha doesn’t think their conversation makes much sense. None of this makes sense. Sanha’s eyes are locked on Computer Boy, who smiles almost apologetically before spinning the stick around with ease. He would be a problem, too, Sanha decides. If he can get away from Computer Boy and Bin once he finds a way out, he would probably be able to make it to somewhere that has a phone and he could call the police.

Jinwoo seems to be muttering the same thing over and over to himself. He picks up his head and looks directly at Sanha. Sanha shifts, ready to grab another one of the sticks off of the wall. Instead of moving towards Sanha, however, Jinwoo turns sideways and hits Bin.

“What was that for?” Bin asks, sounding more confused than hurt. The hit hadn’t been hard. Computer Boy is looking at them from the other side of Jinwoo, and Glasses and Patterned Shirt are still talking to each other.

“Why the heck did you tell Minhyuk to do that?” Jinwoo asks, disappointment in his voice. “We could’ve fixed this. Two more seconds and I would’ve been able to handle the situation.”

Bin grimaces. “You’re the one who said that spell would work, but it didn’t. Look at him, he could be dangerous. We don’t know anything about him. It’s _your_ fault that Oberon is going to come after us.”

“Hey, don’t go pointing fingers! If you had just kept quiet then-”

“You’re scaring the kid,” Glasses says, stepping between Jinwoo and Bin. He has a hand on Bin’s chest, facing Bin more, but he is looking at Jinwoo over his shoulder. “Control yourselves.”

Silence falls upon the group again. Sanha is a mere three inches away from grabbing another stick from the wall of the practice room. These guys seem to really believe in what they think is going on. He had heard that name again, Oberon. Patterned Shirt had said fairies. There is little explanation for what Computer Boy (had they called him Minhyuk?) had been able to do. Maybe, if Sanha can just get a straight answer out of them… He clears his throat, and the five direct their attention to him. It is almost like they had forgotten he was there to begin with.

“What’s ‘fairy struck’?” Sanha pauses. “And, um, no funny business. I know you were lying to me earlier. ‘Fairy’ isn’t a code name for drugs, is it?”

“Fairies are real,” Patterned Shirt says, getting a harsh look from both Jinwoo and Glasses. He ignores both of them. “When you’re Fairy Struck, it means that you had a close encounter with fairies, probably as a kid.”

“When were you born?” Sanha looks at Patterned Shirt for a moment longer before looking at Jinwoo, who had asked the question.

He hesitates, thinking. Does he trust these guys? Sanha had read once that if you knew someone’s name and birth year, you could do all sorts of things with their identity. Everything they had done up to this point made them seem sketchy. “I’m eighteen,” he say eventually.

Sanha watches as Jinwoo’s head drops, his chin almost hitting his chest as he looks at the floor. It was like he had deflated. He shakes his head and speaks, but it is so quiet that Sanha can’t hear a single thing that he had said.

“N-No secrets,” Sanha says. His voice shook more than he would’ve liked. “I was serious when I said that I know judo. I can take all of you down.” Bin scoffs, and Sanha glances at him quickly before looking back at Jinwoo. “I can take almost all of you down.”

Jinwoo nods a little. “You’re right, no secrets. Can we sit down and talk about this properly? We’ll explain everything, I promise.”

Sanha looks them all over. “Keep your distance and we can talk,” Sanha said. He grabs another stick off the wall; none of them seem to react much to that. “And no taking it away from me.” He looks pointedly at Computer Boy. “And I want a real answer as to why there’s blood bags in the bedroom. I bet you don’t even have a broken cooler.”

“I’m out. Have fun babysitting.” Sanha looks at Bin, who rolls his eyes before walking away from the others. He almost wants to call him back, keep them all together, but Sanha thinks he has a better chance at escaping if Bin stays away.

They all watch him walk away. Glasses puts a hand on Jinwoo’s shoulder, letting out a sigh. “I’ll go get him.”

Jinwoo nods, then looks at Sanha. “Please. Let’s go back out into the room, sit down, and I’ll explain everything.”

There is only one way that Sanha is going to understand what is going on here, and that is going to require him to trust these people. He doesn’t know anything about him. In fact, he only knows a few of their names. Sanha grabs the second stick a little tighter. He nods firmly. Sanha would listen to them, but the moment that things got weird again, he would bail. 

Oddly, he believes what Patterned Shirt had said about fairies.


	4. Fairy Touched

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a bit of his history that has been completely overlooked.

Sanha follows Jinwoo, Computer Boy, and Patterned Shirt out of the practice room and down the hall. They walk back into the big room that Sanha had snuck out of earlier while they had been in the room with computers. There are couches in the large room that he had ignored before, three of them set around a square coffee table. Sanha picks to sit on the far edge of one of them, as far away from the others as he can be. Jinwoo and Computer Boy sit on the one directly across from him, and Patterned Shirt flops down in the middle of the third couch that is set against the wall.

There is a quiet moment where none of them say anything. Sanha still holds onto his stick, though he has it lying across his legs near his knees instead of holding it in a position ready for defense. Computer Boy has put the other one down on the coffee table. Eventually, Jinwoo sighs.

“I think you’re Fairy Struck,” he say, and Sanha listens. “Myungjun—” he gestures to Patterned Shirt “—kind of explained what that is, but it’s more complicated. Fairies are difficult.” Jinwoo sits forward, elbows on his knees. “They’re nasty creatures, very prideful and rude but also very curious. They live for a really long time, and they’re fascinated with humans. When fairies get too close to humans for too long, the human can become Fairy Struck.

“Being Fairy Struck lets the human be able to see fairies if they focus on them. Earlier, when you were being chased by bugs, they weren’t bugs. Those were fairies.”

“Why were they chasing me?” Sanha interjects.

“I’ll get to that,” Jinwoo answers, and he continues where he had been going. “Do you remember talking to the fairies? Any conversation at all? Could you understand what they said?”

Sanha turns his head slightly, looking at Jinwoo sideways. “How did you know that?”

Patterned Shirt—no, his name was Myungjun—sighs. The sigh does not sound like a sigh of relief to Sanha. It sounds like the opposite.

“Sometimes the… situation of being Fairy Struck can progress if fairies are with the human for longer. This is called being Fairy Touched. It’s like Fairy Struck, where you have to have a close encounter with fairies, and you can see them, but you can also understand and speak their language.” Jinwoo pauses. “Fairies come from another realm. They didn’t originate here on Earth, and their realm is called Faerie. Being Fairy Touched means you would have also seen Faerie.”

“Wait, the fairies come from Fairy?”

Jinwoo smiles a little, shaking his head. “No, _Fae-rie_ ,” he says, emphasizing the pronunciation. “Fairies aren’t the only creatures that come from Faerie. Any creature that does we call ‘Fae.’ Do you get it?”

Sanha nods, slowly. “Fairies are a type of Fae, and Fae come from _Fae-rie_. Got it.”

“Right. Eleven, almost twelve years ago, we made a deal with the Fae.” Jinwoo looks down at the square table. “There’s a small organization of people who work to keep the world balanced between Fae and the human world. Before this deal, things were very hectic. Fairies would kidnap humans and take them to Faerie, or they would torment them here.” Jinwoo looks up, and Sanha guesses his face must’ve been weird. He gets a small, sad smile from Jinwoo. “It’s nothing to gloss over, but now things aren’t like that.”

“Then you came along.”

Sanha looks away from Jinwoo as Bin comes into the room, Glasses trailing behind him. Bin shoos Myungjun into one side of the couch and sits down heavily in the center, Glasses at his side.

“What do you mean _then I came along_?” Sanha asks, looking from Bin to Jinwoo. “Did I do something?”

Jinwoo shakes his head for a moment, and then stops. “Not exactly. The deal with the fairies was that they could take any person over five years old. When you become Fairy Struck or even Fairy Touched under the age of five, the human brain will block it out. Humans are wired to ignore Fae. That’s why, even though you are Fairy Touched, you still had to focus to see the fairies.”

“I’m Fairy Touched? I thought you said I’m Fairy Struck.”

“We thought you were,” Glasses says. Sanha looks at him and notices that Glasses and Bin were sitting very close together, very comfortably.

“You said that you could understand them when they spoke,” Jinwoo says, taking over, “so that means you’re Fairy Touched. You also likely saw Faerie, even though you probably don’t remember it right now. Anyway, the deal was that fairies were not allowed to interact with anybody older than six years old. The deal was signed eleven years ago, which means you would’ve been seven years old at least. The deal doesn’t protect you from the fairies hurting you or taking you to Faerie.”

Sanha’s brows pull together. “I don’t get it.”

“You’re Fairy Touched,” Bin says, and Sanha looked at him. “In order to be Fairy Touched and have it affect you now, you would’ve had to be over five years old when the deal was signed. Since you were seven or even older when you became Fairy Touched, it means someone violated the contract we had with the Fae.”

A moment passes, and Sanha’s mouth opens slightly. “So I was made Fairy Touched illegally?”

“Technically, yes.” Jinwoo gives him a sad smile again. “Which is not good for you, or any of us.”

For a few moments, there is silence. Sanha’s brain is turning quickly, searching for a thread to latch on to. “I heard the name Oberon earlier. Who’s that?”

“An asshole,” Bin mutters, and both Glasses and Myungjun elbow him. Bin scowls and seems to almost shrink in on himself.

“There are two courts in Faerie,” Jinwoo says. “The two are the Seelie Court, of the light, and the Unseelie Court, the dark. Oberon is the Seelie King, and his wife Titania is the Seelie Queen. They are the ones that we made our deal with.”

“Wait,” Sanha says. “Why do those names sound familiar?”

“Shakespeare.” Sanha looks at Glasses when he speaks. “He was Fairy Touched, and Oberon and Titania thought that if he wrote about them, humans might be more susceptible. Even the king and queen were in it for only themselves. Shakespeare just took their names and the fact that they were fairies for his play _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Oberon and Titania were mad about that, of course. They didn’t think that it put them in a very good light.”

“There are rumors that Shakespeare was taken to Faerie and that they didn’t actually bury a body in his grave,” Myungjun says. “I think that’s dumb. Even if he _did_ go to Faerie, he wouldn’t have lasted very long.”

Sanha looks at Myungjun worriedly, and Jinwoo clears his throat. When Sanha looks at Jinwoo, he is giving Myungjun a look that very clearly says _be careful of what you say_. He redirects his attention, and Jinwoo is speaking again.

“Yes, so, Oberon and Titania are the king and queen of the Seelie Court. They are the ones that we signed our agreement with. We thought that you were younger than you are and maybe a few rogue fairies had broken the deal. It was also possible that the fairies who attacked you belonged to the Unseelie Court. Marwig is the Unseelie King.”

“It doesn’t matter if they were Seelie or Unseelie anymore, though,” Bin says, and the way he says it makes Sanha’s stomach turn. “Fae hold tightly to their deals, and they’re going to be mad that you exist, whether they’re Oberon’s or Marwig’s. It almost doesn’t even matter that the deal was signed with Oberon, because Marwig will support Oberon instead of humans.”

“But, I don’t remember becoming Fairy Touched.” Sanha’s hands tighten around the stick resting on his thighs. “I didn’t do anything—”

 

“We know,” Jinwoo says. “We won’t let them get to you. We will try to set up a meeting with Oberon and get this sorted out. We’ll find the fairies responsible, and maybe we can persecute the fairies instead of letting them punish you.”

“There’s, like, millions of fairies,” Bin says, unhelpfully. “How would we ever be able to track down the one fairy that made him Fairy Touched? We’re going to have to offer some sort of bargaining chip. Wipe his memory entirely or something like that.”

“Bin, we can’t just—” Glasses starts, but he is cut off.

“He’s right,” Myungjun says. “Oberon and Marwig won’t stand for a deal being broken. You can find the fairy, take them out of the picture, sure. But the kid is still going to be alive, and he’ll still be able to see the fairies and understand the language.”

“We will figure _something_ out.” All eyes go to Jinwoo. Jinwoo, though, is looking only at Sanha. He is looking at him incredibly intensely, too, and Sanha can only compare the look Jinwoo gives him to how a parent would look at their child.

“I promise,” Jinwoo says, “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”


	5. Seeds of Knowledge and War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sanha learns more about his new companions, and he also gets a taste of what is to come if they can't get this situation under control.

There is a lot to take in. Sanha is quiet, and he knows the others are waiting for him to say something. Anything probably would’ve been okay, but there is still something nagging at the back of Sanha’s mind. It’s silly, and it might not even have anything at all to do with fairies. Or maybe it does? He needs to know.

“This still doesn’t explain the blood in the cooler in the bedroom.”

Bin groans. Jinwoo laughs and beside him, Computer Boy smiles. Sanha looks at Myungjun when he speaks. “I like this kid,” Myungjun says. “Can we keep him?”

“No, we cannot,” Bin say, sinking into the modest, green couch. He looks at Sanha, and Sanha thinks that if he was a fish, Bin would be the shark that ate him alive. “You’re really dense.”

Sanha opens his mouth to complain about the rudeness of his statement, but Jinwoo beats him to it. “It’s not fair that we haven’t answered all your questions, but there’s also a lot going on here that you might not be ready to hear. After just learning about Fae and what it means for you, do you really want—”

 

“I can take it,” Sanha says, nodding firmly. “It can’t be that much worse than knowing that fairies exist.”

“Are you sure about that?” Bin asks, raising a brow. “Because the blood isn’t there in case we get hurt.”

Sanha swallows and glances from Bin to Jinwoo, who nods a little. That little nod gives him the push he needs. It also makes him realize that despite not knowing anything about him, Sanha trusts Jinwoo. Maybe he doesn’t trust him with his life, yet, but he trusts Jinwoo to only do what is best for him, and that counts for something.

“I want to know,” Sanha says with as much confidence as he can muster.

Bin smirks, and the expression is so different from the one that Sanha had seen on him up until this point that it is almost unsettling. Pointing at himself with a thumb, Bin says a single word. 

“Vampire.”

“Hey,” Myungjun whines beside him. “You can do better than that! Give a proper introduction for yourself! This kid has to put up with you from now until this thing is figured out, so you should probably try to make him not hate you.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sanha says quickly. “I’m a little scared of you, but I don’t hate you.” Bin is staring at him, and he knows that his nerves are probably showing. He swallows. “You said… vampire?”

“Not like in the movies,” Bin says. He crosses his arms over his chest. “I don’t kill people anymore. That’s what the cooler full of blood is for, so I don’t die or go into a blood-driven craze. I can go out during the day, too, as long as the sun doesn’t hit my skin directly.”

“So you’re like an _advanced_ vampire.” Awe has already seeped into Sanha’s voice. “Do you, like, sleep in a coffin?”

Glasses laughs beside Bin, covering his mouth with his hand. Bin scowls at Glasses before looking at Sanha again. “No, I do _not_ sleep in a coffin. I might be a vampire, but I still want to be comfortable. Whoever started that idea that vampires sleep in coffins needs to come take that one up with me, because I’m tired of—”

“There he goes again,” Myungjun says, earning a glare from Bin so harsh that Sanha thought the man in the patterned shirt would die just from being looked at like that. Myungjun leans forward, closer to Sanha, and Sanha leans towards him unconsciously.

“He likes to think he breaks all the stereotypes,” Myungjun whispers. He does a very bad job at whispering, though, and the others all smile in acknowledgement while Bin continues to glare.

“At least I’m not conceited,” Bin huffs, which earns another muffled laugh from Glasses. It is easy to figure out that Bin is, in fact, very conceited. Sanha wonders how far the teasing remarks went with these guys.

“You really are, though,” Computer Boy says, speaking up for the first time in a while. Sanha had nearly forgotten that he was sitting there (but not really, because who could forget a cute boy sitting in the room).

“He’s worse than I am!” Bin says defensively, sitting up, pointing at Myungjun beside him. Glasses whispers something to him, a hand on his thick arm. Bin sinks back into the couch and the hand stays on his arm.

“Are all of you…” Sanha doesn’t know what to call them. Creatures? They look human, so it feels weird to call them creatures.

“Yes,” Myungjun says. “We are. You can call me Myungjun. I’m a triton.”

Sanha’s eyebrows move, showing his confusion, which is the only response it seems that he has to give. “Think of me as sort of a male siren, naiad combination. Sirens and naiads are typically female. Sirens have these wild voices that allow them to lure people to their deaths, and naiads look like beautiful women. Both of them live exclusively in the water.”

“But you don’t?” Sanha glances at them all. Myungjun is looking at him, Jinwoo is looking at Myungjun, and the other three have their eyes averted. Sanha had heard Bin almost yelling at Myungjun earlier about hiding something, so this must have been it.

“I gave up the water,” Myungjun offers. “That’s a story for another time, though.” From the corner of his eye, Sanha sees Jinwoo smile ever so slightly. There is definitely something going on there.

“You’re up,” Bin says, bumping his arm against Glasses.

Glasses folds one leg over the other, the action causing him to lean into Bin more. It looks so casual that Sanha wouldn’t have even noticed it if he wasn’t paying attention to every thing each one of them did. Nothing would get passed him.

“My name is Dongmin,” Glasses says. “I’m a lycan.”

Sanha’s brows scrunch for a brief moment. “A lycan? What’s—”

“It’s a werewolf, basically,” Bin says, earning a slap to his arm from Dongmin.

“I _told_ you, a lycan is not a werewolf. Lycanthropes are different.” Dongmin puts his attention on Sanha again, ignoring Bin as Bin prods his hand. “Lycans are smarter. You probably heard stories or watched movies where werewolves shifted on the full moon. Lycans can shift at will. Most lycans are also born into it, where werewolves are usually bitten by another werewolf.”

“Yeah, and you still turn into a dog,” Bin teases. Sanha watches as Bin smiles and Dongmin glares at him, a reversal of roles that he has seen previously.

“I’m not a dog, and you know that,” Dongmin huffs, his words directed at Bin. After managing his expression, Dongmin looks at Sanha again. “I turn into a wolf, but lycans are more muscular than werewolves in our wolf form. The whole silver thing also doesn’t work on me.”

“Good thing it doesn’t, too,” Bin comments. Sanha heard another story starting there, but he had a bigger question to ask.

“Can you shift now?”

Dongmin looks taken aback by the question. Jinwoo laughs, loud, and Sanha looks between the other three who all look about as amused as Jinwoo sounds. The expression on Dongmin’s face appears uncomfortable.

“I said something wrong, didn’t I?” Sanha shrinks down on himself a little. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know if I’m not supposed to ask that or—”

“You’re okay,” Dongmin says. “Maybe another time, though? It’s not exactly comfortable being a wolf, and I would rather not—”

“Wolf Boy doesn’t like being a wolf,” Bin interrupts. “That’s why he’s here with us instead of out there, I don’t know, knocking over garbage cans or something.”

“I find that offensive,” Dongmin says, and when he looks at Bin, Sanha realizes that he sees nothing other than Bin. Yeah, there is something going on between them and it is pretty clear what that something is.

Myungjun must’ve noticed Sanha’s staring. He gets up from the couch, sits down beside Sanha, and mumbles, “Yeah, those two are about as subtle as a bull in a china shop.”

Sanha covers a giggle. Dongmin looks up at them, cheeks pink. Did he hear them? Sanha still has some questions to ask Dongmin about being a lycan, but Myungjun claps his hands. “Who’s left?” he asks, his voice taking on a tone like an announcers. “I’m a triton. Bin is a vampire. Dongmin is a lycan. Minhyuk, your turn. You were the one that scared the boy in the first place. Give him an explanation!”

Computer Boy shifts where he sits and shrugs with one shoulder. “I’m, uh, Minhyuk, and I’m telekinetic.” There is silence after he speaks, and Bin coughs into his hand.

“So, you can just grab anything you want to from far away?” Sanha sits forward a little. “That sounds really lazy.”

Myungjun, Jinwoo, Dongmin, and Bin all break into heavy laughter. Jinwoo leans sideways and pushes Minhyuk’s leg, even. Sanha looks around himself, not quite getting the joke. Has he found the truth about Minhyuk? Is he really lazy? That would explain why they’re laughing so much. Minhyuk looks unsettled. He is focusing on the coffee table, but his eyes lift for just a moment to meet Sanha’s.

It is almost in wonder that Sanha watches as Minhyuk picks up his hand. The stick flies off his lap and straight into Minhyuk’s hand, just as it had before in the hallway. A quiet gasp escapes Sanha. He covers his mouth in embarrassment.

“That’s so cool,” he almost whispers.

“What about you?” Myungjun asks, elbowing Sanha. “You haven’t given an introduction for yourself.”

“Neither has Jinwoo,” Dongmin fills in.

“There’s not much to introduce about myself,” Jinwoo offers. “I’m human, just like any normal person. I’ve picked up some spells along the way, nothing too fancy.”

“Like the one you put on me,” Sanha says. “That was a spell, right? What was that supposed to do, anyway?”

“Well, you got attacked by fairies,” Myungjun says, answering instead of Jinwoo. “Marwig’s fairies attack at random sometimes, and Jinwoo thought you were younger than you were. If you were younger, the deal would’ve protected you and all that. He figured ‘let’s wipe his memory, take him back to the bunker, take care of the rash on his arms then we can send him home.’ That’s how it was supposed to go, at least. Did we mention that Fairy Touched means you have a slight immunity to magic?”

Sanha shakes his head. “You didn’t say that. That sounds _super_ cool.”

The other five laugh softly, and Sanha smiles. He feels strangely at ease with these not quite strangers. He knows their names, he can guess at their ages, and they seem to want the best for him. Sanha thinks that he can trust them, at least a little. They also definitely aren’t his imprisoners. That is a comforting thought. If they are, they’re doing a terrific job of making Sanha feel as comfortable as possible. With what Minhyuk has shown him with his telekinesis, and how honestly they talk about themselves and what they are, Sanha feels genuine truth behind their words.

Jinwoo is still smiling. He pushes himself to the edge of the couch. “Alright, we need to get you into a room. Probably Minhyuk’s. He’s the only one with a room for himself. It might be a bit cluttered in there, but—”

“I’m not going home?” Sanha asks. “My parents, they’re— Oh my gosh, they’re probably _freaking_ out right now. Mom gets really worried when I’m not home before dark, and I don’t know what time it is but it’s probably really, _really_ dark outside right now, right?” Sanha stands up. “I need to go home.”

“Hey, hey,” Jinwoo says, standing up as Sanha did. “You can call your parents. Tell them you went to a friend’s house nearby, you got distracted, it got late, and you’re going to spend the night because it’s safer for you to stay there than try and make it home.”

“What if Mom tries to come pick me up?” Sanha tightens his hands into fists. “We have to have an answer for every question, because my mom asks a lot of questions.”

“If she offers to pick you up, remind her that you have your bike.” Sanha looks at Dongmin, sighing in relief at the easy answer.

“Okay.” Sanha nods. “Where’s my phone?”

Sanha’s phone had been put in the room with the computers. Jinwoo makes him wait until Minhyuk types something on the computer (the explanation he gets is “it’s a location scrambler”) before he can call. His mom sounds incredibly worried, and Sanha feels awful. He makes his voice light and even laughs a few times to prove to his mom that he is okay. Sanha’s acting skills aren’t the best, but it’s enough to fool his mom. When she hangs up, he puts his phone down on the table beside him.

“She said she wants me to come home before school,” Sanha says. “Which is a fair thing to ask.”

Jinwoo nods. “Right. We’ll drive you home. Let’s get you into—”

“Where are we?” Sanha asks. “You have to tell me. Are we still in Seoul?”

From the look on Jinwoo’s face alone, he knows that they are not still in Seoul. “We’re just outside of Guri. It’s not that far from—”

“That’s like an hour and a half from where I live!” Sanha shouts. “How am I going to get home before I have to go to school? That’s so far.” He sighs. “I’m going to have to wake up really early, aren’t I?”

“We’ll get you home in plenty of time, don’t worry,” Myungjun says as he pops his head into the room. “Bin and Dongmin moved the bed into Minhyuk’s room from storage. It’s a little cleaner in there now, too, and Dongmin is going to loan you some of his clothes so you can sleep comfortably. He’s probably the closest to your size, so he offered.”

Sanha nods, and he follows Myungjun and Jinwoo to the bedroom. Minhyuk trails behind them, quiet as ever. He wonders if that’s part of being telekinetic. Sanha will have to ask him when he gets the chance. There is a bathroom connected to the bedroom, and Sanha changes his clothes there. He folds the blue jean pants and yellow shirt he had been wearing (disappointed that there’s a mysterious stain on the shoulder of his shirt) and sets them gently on the table beside his bed when he exits the bathroom. Minhyuk is lounging on his own bed, a larger bed than Sanha’s. It seems fair to him that the bed that is permanently in the room is larger than his own, but Sanha is tall. His feet will probably stick out as he slept tonight. He pulls back the blanket that had been tossed over the bed messily and sits on the exposed sheets.

The room is quiet. Minhyuk has a laptop on his legs and he is typing, rather quickly. It feels weird, sitting with nothing to do. Sanha guesses he could just roll over and go to sleep or play a game on his phone. There is another person in the room, though, and he knows almost nothing about his temporary roommate.

“So, you’re telekinetic? How did that happen?”

Sanha waits as Minhyuk looks up at him, his laptop momentarily forgotten. “I dunno, really.” His eyes turn back to the computer screen.

Eager to find out, Sanha adjusts his sitting position. He crosses his legs on the bed like a child, his hands in his lap. “Were you just born telekinetic? That’s pretty cool, actually. My situation sounds pretty dumb.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Minhyuk says, his voice lacking enthusiasm. He only responds to the ending comment, not the first ones.

Sanha sits in silence. He stares at Minhyuk, and Minhyuk ignores him. As Sanha tilts his head, he realizes that Minhyuk’s ears are pierced. He wears tiny black studs. They could’ve easily been looked over, but Sanha is interested in Minhyuk. Quiet, telekinetic Minhyuk.

“Telekinetic means you can read minds too, right?” Sanha straightens up. Is Minhyuk reading his mind now?

“That’s telepathy, not telekinesis.”

Sanha is relieved. He can think freely about Minhyuk and not have to worry about his thoughts being known. In that case, Sanha will observe Minhyuk. He leans back, the metal bars of the simple bed frame poking into his spine. Sanha adjusts his pillow and tried again, more comfortable this time. Minhyuk is cute. He could probably even be called handsome, Sanha thinks. Whatever he’s focusing on must take a lot of work. Just staring at Minhyuk, though, Sanha is sort of getting bored.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” Sanha asks.

“Not really.” Minhyuk doesn’t look up from his screen.

“I probably talk enough for the both of us,” Sanha comments. “Sometimes I think I talk _too_ much.”

There was a pause before Minhyuk replies. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Hey!” Sanha frowns. “That’s not very nice.”

Minhyuk smiles, glancing at Sanha. “You should get some sleep.”

Sanha sighs. He knows Minhyuk is right. It takes some wiggling and adjusting, but Sanha gets comfortable in the bed. The lights go out, and Sanha looked over his shoulder at Minhyuk across the room. Blue light from the laptop lights Minhyuk’s face, and he doesn’t look like he had moved at all.

“You used your telepathy for that, didn’t you?”

“My telekinesis, yes.”

Sanha turns his head back how it had been, facing mostly away from Minhyuk. He had learned a lot today. Fairies are real, and they don’t like him. Tritons, which he had never heard of before, are real. Are they rare? He adds that to the growing list of unanswered questions in his mind. Vampires are also real, and scary, and _this_ vampire is dating an almost-werewolf that is actually a lycan. Jinwoo is human, but magic is real. It feels almost weird to think about the homework that Sanha hadn’t finished before he took off on his bike ride. The soft sound of Minhyuk’s fingers typing paired with the hum of an invisible A/C unit lulls Sanha into a dreamless sleep.

******

The morning was hectic, to put it simply. Sanha watched five boys maneuver in a kitchen before the sun had even fully risen. There was bacon and eggs and waffles. Myungjun was talking to Bin and completely missed the cup he was trying to pour orange juice into. Dongmin removed the gauze from Sanha’s arms, revealing skin that was no longer pink. When asked, Dongmin told Sanha that it was just a rash that the fairies could sometimes cause. Jinwoo and Dongmin sat with Sanha and made a game plan for the day that required Sanha to tell them his schedule. Jinwoo would take him home, posing as his friend’s older brother. Sanha’s mom would take him to school, and he would go to school, and it would be important that he packed clothes. It was going to require some lying, but Sanha had to tell his mom that she had told him earlier in the week that he could spend the weekend at his friend’s house. After school he would walk to his guitar lesson, and after his guitar lesson, Jinwoo would pick him up and bring him back to the bunker.

Jinwoo and Sanha were both quiet for a majority of the ride to his house. It was a comfortable silence, quiet music filling the gaps when neither of them said anything for long stretches of time. Most of the questions Jinwoo asked him were clarifying things. Was he sure that he had a guitar lesson after school? Was he positive that he had saved Jinwoo and Minhyuk’s numbers in his phone? Sanha didn’t say much to his mom when he got home, either, except for when she asked questions about his friend. Since the only one of the boys he had met that was near his age was Minhyuk, he used him as a reference. Minhyuk became a character that was shorter than himself, tan, and in the grade above Sanha at the academy he attended.

His mom was shocked when he ran out of the car, saying he would see her on Sunday. She stammered and called after him, and Sanha just yelled back, “You told me on Monday that I could!” He did get a text message from her not long after he got inside his school, only telling him to be safe. The day dragged on, Sanha did the homework he had not been able to do the night before, and Jinwoo texted him halfway through the day to remind him of the plan.

Sanha thought that Jinwoo might’ve been a little paranoid.

As Sanha walks from his school to his guitar lesson three blocks away, he finds himself instinctively focusing on every bug he passes. Not a single one of them sprouts a tiny human body in place of their multiple legs and segmented torsos. He expects to see pink hair on a tiny human with butterfly wings. A moth hovers in front of his face, alarmingly close, and Sanha raises his hands to bat it away.

He turns a corner, the last corner that needed to be turned for him to get to his lesson. There is a dragonfly near the front door. Sanha ignores it as he draws closer, not expecting it to be anything more than a bug. As the distance shortens, he glances at it and sees the bug’s body change quickly into the body of a petite woman. The fairy must be able to sense that she has been spotted, because she quickly takes flight on translucent wings and flies up to Sanha’s face.

Instinct reacts quicker than Sanha’s brain does. Guitar case in hand and his backpack on one shoulder, he races inside the building. The automatic doors open much slower than he would’ve liked, and the tiny fairy is right behind him. He heads straight for the first closed room he sees. The bathroom is unoccupied, thankfully, and Sanha locks the door behind himself. What if the fairy is getting more fairies? Would they attack in such a public place? A swarm of bugs would draw attention, and it would likely affect more than just Sanha. What is he going to do?

His hands shake as he tosses off his backpack, digging through the pockets for his phone. He has Minhyuk’s number saved on here somewhere, right? Minhyuk had typed it in this morning. Sanha pulls his belongings away from the bathroom door and crouches against the far wall.

“Minhyuk!” Sanha shouts once the boy had answered. Three rings. That’s too much time. The fairy could’ve called other fairies by now. “They found me. Where’s Jinwoo? Tell him to pick me up.”

“The fairies?” Minhyuk’s voice is urgent. “Where are you?” Someone else is speaking on the other end, but Sanha can’t tell who it was. “Dongmin is calling Jinwoo to tell him. I’m not in Seoul with Jinwoo. Just stay where you are. Where are you?”

There is laughter from the other side of the door. The laughter is high pitched, almost shrill, and Sanha curls in on himself. “I’m hiding in the bathroom. I think there’s at least three fairies outside. When you go in the building, I think it’s the second door you see.”

“You’re safe,” Minhyuk says. His voice sounds far away as he relays the new information to Dongmin. When his voice comes back, Sanha breathes in relief. “Really, it’s a good thing you got into a closed room so fast. I’m proud of you for thinking like that.”

Sanha feels his heart settle its erratic rhythm as Minhyuk praises him. “Just tell Jinwoo to hurry, okay? And can you—is it alright if you stay on the line until he gets here?”

There is a soft laugh from the other boy, a laugh warm enough that it makes Sanha forget for just a second that his life is possibly in danger. “Yeah, I’ll stay on the phone. Jinwoo will take care of them and get you out of there.”

“Um, how was your day?” Sanha asks, distracting himself the only way he knows how to. The laughter outside the door comes again. Had someone just said something about bugs outside? He can’t hear properly through the heavy door. Sanha focuses on listening to Minhyuk as he begins to recount the normalities of his day thus far. 

“Well, after Jinwoo left with you, I went back to sleep.” Minhyuk laughs, and Sanha can imagine Minhyuk as the type to sleep in late. “The other guys left me alone. Um.”

“I was going to ask you yesterday,” Sanha says, eyes glancing at the door and then focusing on the toilet in the corner, “but is being quiet part of being telekinetic? You really didn’t say anything much to me yesterday.”

“It’s a bad habit,” Minhyuk comments, and Sanha thinks that maybe he sounds a little sheepish. “Talking is good, though. Are you okay out there?”

Sanha nods, then realizes Minhyuk can’t see him. “Yeah, I’m good. Jinwoo isn’t here yet, but I also can’t hear the fairies outside. Do you think they’ll get to me first?”

“I think you’ll be safe until Jinwoo gets there,” Minhyuk says. “And fairies are wary of closed rooms anyway. It’s unlikely that they’ll actually go in the bathroom. Is it a small bathroom?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of small. It’s not big like the one on the second floor.”

“That’s good, then,” Minhyuk says. Listening to him talk, it was almost easy to tune out the world outside of the bathroom. “Oh, Jinwoo told us to find a way to fix this thing and we think we know how to fix it. We can tell you the details later, though.”

“Promise?” Sanha says, his voice hopeful. “I’m going to get out of here, and you’re going to tell me everything, right?”

“I promise, Sanha,” Minhyuk assures him. Sanha is thankful for the quiet chatter.

There is laughing outside of the door again, and he’s pretty sure he hears someone asking why the bugs are gathered around the bathroom door. Sanha thinks that maybe he had made a whining sound, but he isn’t sure.

“Sanha, just focus on my voice,” Minhyuk says, so he does. “You’re going to be just fine, I promise. When you get back here, maybe we can, uh, I don’t know. What do you like to do?” 

There is a pause, but Sanha says nothing. 

“I spend a lot of my free time on the internet. There’s a lot of forums about telekinesis. Most of the people want to become telekinetic, which makes me feel a lot better about having telekinesis.” Though Minhyuk had been quiet the night before, he is talking nonstop now. Sanha is thankful for that. He stands up, leaning against the tiled bathroom wall, focusing on Minhyuk’s voice until finally he hears Jinwoo’s voice outside.

“Open up the door,” Sanha hears. “We have to go, _now_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're looking for some early spoilers of chapters to come or if you want to help proofread, send me a message @snibnoom on Tumblr or Twitter (though I'll probably respond faster on Tumblr)


	6. Down Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of waiting to be done.

The easy part had been getting into the bathroom, but now Sanha has to get out. He hangs up with Minhyuk, promising to text him as soon as they are safe (Minhyuk made him promise). Sanha would have been lying if he said that he wasn’t scared, but Jinwoo is right outside the bathroom door. He believes that they can do this.

He should’ve doubted himself more.

Sanha opens the bathroom door, and fairies flew into the room above his head. He thought he counted at least six. Jinwoo’s hand is on his wrist, yanking him into motion. Feet stumble beneath Sanha as he struggles to get moving while carrying his guitar and backpack. People in the main lobby of the building shout as Jinwoo and Sanha whisk by. For a brief moment, Sanha realizes that his mother would probably get a phone call about him skipping practice. A more pressing matter of a tiny pink fairy in his field of vision comes to the forefront of his mind instead.

“Jinwoo, they’re—”

“Just keep running!” Jinwoo shouts. “I parked down the street, in the van.” His words shake as they run. They are outside now, and Jinwoo flings Sanha forward as he stops in his own tracks. Sanha doesn’t pay attention as Jinwoo’s hands begin to wave in the air, green sparks shooting through the space in front of him.

When Sanha gets to the van, there is a tiny fairy waiting on one of the side mirrors. Sanha yelps and tosses his guitar in messily, climbing in. He is sitting on his case, his backpack a lump in his lap. Moving quickly, he tosses his backpack into the other chair in the backseat. Why is his guitar case so large? He shoves it, getting it to lie on the floor flat enough to not be an obstacle. Sanha yelped when the front door opened, not expecting Jinwoo to be here so fast. The door shuts and angry fairies beat against the windows. Jinwoo sticks the key in the ignition, forgoing his seatbelt, and takes off.

There are a few minutes where neither of them say anything, just sitting as Jinwoo drove. Heavy breathing fills the place between them.

“Get up here,” Jinwoo says, gesturing to the passenger seat in the front of the car.

Sanha judges the space between the seats and decides he could wiggle through. He makes it through like the thought he would, but not without accidentally kicking Jinwoo in the arm. As he apologizes, Jinwoo is swiping on his phone and clicking buttons on the steering wheel.

“Siri, call Minhyuk,” Jinwoo says, glancing over at Sanha. As his phone begins to ring over the car’s intercom, Jinwoo sighs. “Sanha, seatbelt, now.” Following his own words, Jinwoo buckles himself in.

Sanha follows instructions and waits as the phone rang. The call goes to voicemail, and Jinwoo sighs again for the second time in two minutes. He ends the call. Moments later, his phone is ringing loudly throughout the car. A quick tap answers the call.

“How are plans going?” Jinwoo says, not giving any sort of greeting to whoever had called him back. (Sanha thought it was probably Minhyuk.) “Dongmin tried to tell me, but I was worried about Sanha. Have you found her?”

“Found who?” Sanha asks, not realizing that the call was essentially on speaker.

“Sanha!” Minhyuk says, his loud voice booming through the many speakers in the sedan. “You’re alright?”

Sanha opens his mouth to respond, but doesn’t get the chance. “He’s fine,” Jinwoo says, his voice short. “Did you find Callah?”

“Who’s Callah?” Sanha asks. He gets a very specific look from Jinwoo. If he had to put it into words, the look would’ve said _Sanha, you’re great, but you really talk a lot_.

“Callah is a human that’s Fairy Touched,” Jinwoo elaborates. “Oberon has a special charge over her, meaning no Fae can hurt her. We’re trying to figure out how she got him to do that, and—”

“Jinwoo,” Minhyuk interrupts. “You left out the part that she’s 300 years old, and _really_ illusive.”

Sanha gasps. “She’s _how_ old? That’s not possible.”

“It is possible,” Jinwoo continues. “She’s real, and it’s possible. Minhyuk, have you found her?”

“Wait, if Oberon does to me what he did to Callah, am I gonna be immortal?” Sanha’s jaw drops and he looks forward. “I could be immortal.”

Jinwoo smiles a little. “Maybe. Uh, probably. Actually, we’re not sure. Minhyuk, have you found her?”

“She’s hard to track down,” Minhyuk says. “We know that she’s in the country, and we think she’s in Hongseong. We haven’t been able to contact her, but—”

“She has an Instagram!”

Sanha laughs as he hears Myungjun yell in the background. Minhyuk laughs too. “Just kidding,” he says. “We found her. Get back here. We’ll get in contact with her and tell you the game plan once you get here.”

The call ends a few moments later after short goodbyes. Sanha sinks into his seat, thinking. “Jinwoo,” he says after a moment, looking at the other. “Could I really become immortal? That sounds scary.”

Jinwoo smiles a little, glancing at Sanha. “You’d be with Myungjun and Bin for eternity, so it wouldn’t be all that awful.”

Sanha ponders the pros and cons of being an immortal as Jinwoo drives them towards the bunker outside Guri. He would probably live long enough to see aliens if he was an immortal, but he would also probably outlive his entire family.. Would he be able to find someone to spend his life with if he was immortal? How hard was it to make someone immortal? Maybe Sanha could learn magic and make his favorite person immortal so that he would have someone to be with. Jinwoo did say that he would be with Myungjun and Bin. So vampires really were immortal? Tritons must be immortal, too, then, if Jinwoo was being entirely honest.

When they arrive at the bunker outside Guri, Sanha is still surprised. The house looks like a normal house. There are lights on in the windows (set on timers, Jinwoo had told him that morning) and when he walks in, it is furnished just like any normal house. It’s the basement where they had been up until now. A door in the kitchen of this magnificent house leads down to the place that Sanha will be calling home for the next three days. He sighs and is careful with his guitar as he holds it in front of him on the way down the dimly lit stairs.

It is loud in the bunker. Sanha is aware of Minhyuk and Bin yelling at each other. There is a radio playing bubbly music (a type of music that didn’t really fit any of their personalities aside from Dongmin and Myungjun, and maybe himself). Books are strewn across the floor in so many places that Sanha has to scoot along the perimeter of the room or risk stepping on them.

“Sanha!” Minhyuk shouts, the first to recognize that he and Jinwoo had arrived. “Jinwoo, you’re here, too. Good.”

“Take a seat,” Dongmin says, turning down the radio so they could all hear each other. “We’ve got a game plan figured out while you were rescuing Sanha.”

Sanha wants to say that he hadn’t needed rescuing, but that would have been a lie so he kept his mouth shut. He puts his guitar case on top of the books on the square coffee table and sets his backpack beside his feet when he sits. The last thing on Sanha’s mind is the homework he has to do over the weekend.

“We got in contact with Callah,” Dongmin starts. He is sitting on the couch where Jinwoo and Minhyuk had sat the day before. Bin is seated behind him, flipping almost carelessly through another book. “We explained the situation, and she said if we would pick her up, she would come here and help us figure out a way to keep Sanha safe.”

“That’s it?” Jinwoo asks, seated beside Myungjun on the green couch. “That easy?”

“Well,” Minhyuk says, “not exactly.” He comes around the back of the couch and sits beside Sanha, flashing him a smile. Sanha ignores the flip his heart does.

“Callah doesn’t know a way to fix the issue either,” Myungjun supplies. “Not yet, at least. She said she wants to meet Sanha and that she will more than likely be able to figure something out once she does.”

Sanha nods a little, and so does Jinwoo. “Alright,” Jinwoo says, sitting up. “Myungjun, Dongmin, you two should go pick up Callah. Bring her back as soon as you can. You said she’s in Hongseong? That’s about three hours away.”

“We’ll get there and back in five hours,” Myungjun says as he gets to his feet. Sanha smiles, liking the adventurous look on Myungjun’s face. He is already walking away as Jinwoo stumbles over his words begging Myungjun to be safe.

“I’ll keep him going a reasonable speed,” Dongmin assures Jinwoo. Sanha averts his eyes as Dongmin presses a kiss to Bin’s temple. He only looks up again once Dongmin has followed Myungjun out of the room, probably to gather whatever they needed to take with them.

“Minhyuk, you’re coming with me,” Jinwoo says. He stands up, and Minhyuk follows suit. “You and I need to plant as many marigolds and primroses as we can.”

Sanha’s brows scrunch. “Why the gardening? Does Callah only go to places with flowers or something?”

Minhyuk’s laughter makes Sanha smile, and Jinwoo sighs. “Marigolds and primroses reflect fairies,” Jinwoo tells him. “The smell makes them weak, so they can’t be around them.”

“Oh,” Sanha says, his voice soft. “Alright, that makes sense.”

Jinwoo nods and as he begins giving directions to Minhyuk, Sanha sinks into the couch. He runs his hand over the wooden arm of the couch. It almost looks hand made. Is one of these boys also a carpenter, or had all of this stuff been scavenged along the way? Sanha thinks it is more likely the latter.

“Sanha.”

Looking up sharply, he meets Bin’s gaze. “Yeah?” he says, almost timidly.

Bin didn’t react to the tone of Sanha’s voice. “Come with me. I have something to show—er, give you.” When Sanha doesn’t move, Bin groans. “Come _on_. I swear, you’re slower than Jinwoo sometimes.”

Sanha gets to his feet, unsure of Bin’s intentions. Surely he isn’t going to drink from him, is he? No, Bin had said that he didn’t drink from people. Sanha wondered why. Something must have happened to make Bin that way. Had he killed someone? As Sanha caught up to Bin (who had started walking before Sanha was even standing up completely), he begins to rattle off questions.

“Are you vegetarian?”

“What? No, I love meat.”

“If you’re a vampire, don’t you live only on blood?”

“Well, yeah, that’s the only thing that actually solves my hunger. I still eat regular food, though. It’s tastes too good to pass up.”

“Are you and Dongmin a couple?”

“Yeah, you could call us that.”

“Are Myungjun and Jinwoo a couple?”

“They try to be sly about it, but they’re not. We all know they’re a thing.”

“How long have you known the others?”

“Myungjun and Jinwoo for about two years, and Dongmin for a little less than that. Minhyuk and I have known each other for a really long time, though.”

“Have you ever ki—”

“This is it,” Bin says. He stops walking but Sanha takes a few extra steps before he reacts. Bin pushes open the heavy door, and as it scrapes against the floor it makes a harsh noise. It looks wooden, but Sanha guesses it is actually iron or steel.

With the door fully open, Sanha can only stare. This is clearly an armory. There are weapons lining the walls. Silver knifes glint in the lights, swords are hung in their jeweled sheaths, and boxes upon boxes of whatever is useful lines the shelves on either side of the thin room. Sanha would’ve started asking questions again, but he is captivated.

Eventually, Sanha finds his voice. “What _is_ all this stuff?”

“Armory stuff,” Bin says, unhelpfully. He had moved into the room now, opening boxes on the shelves. Sanha watches as he moves from one to another until he finally pulls a small canvas pouch out of one of the boxes on the lower shelves. “Catch.”

Sanha catches the pouch when Bin throws it, just barely. “What is it?” Sanha asks, already pulling the strings to open it.

“Fairy dust,” Bin says, causing Sanha to stop what he is doing. He looks up at Bin, not quite believing him because of how flat Bin had said it. The smile that comes across Bin’s face is comforting. “Nah, not really. It’s iron powder. Fairies are basically allergic to the stuff. If something goes wrong, just throw a handful of this stuff in an arc to get as many of them as you can, then run like hell.” Sanha knows he is making a weird face, and Bin’s sigh sounds amused. “I’m not saying you’ll have to use it, but just in case.”

Sanha opens the pouch all the way, peering inside. He sticks a finger into the opening. When he pulls his hand back, there were tiny black specks stuck to his skin. “It looks like pencil shavings,” he comments.

“Yeah, just don’t tell Jinwoo that I gave you that.” Bin motions Sanha into the hallway and closes the door behind himself. “I’m too lazy to go mark it off the inventory, so keep it a secret, okay?”

Sanha smiles a little, nodding. “Yeah, okay.” He pulls the cords, closing the pouch. “Thanks, B—” When he looks up, Bin is already walking away. “Thanks!” he calls. Bin raises a hand over his head, waving it once simply in acknowledgement.

With Minhyuk busy with Jinwoo, Bin off to do whatever, and Dongmin and Myungjun both gone, Sanha is pretty much alone. He wanders through the halls, swinging the pouch. It was easy to see that there were a lot of books around. Sometimes he would peek into rooms, pick a book at random and read a few pages. Sanha learned that all kinds of creatures classified as Fae. Apparently some of the more recognizable ones that weren’t fairies were pixies (Sanha thought fairies and pixies were the same, but they clearly weren’t; pixies didn’t speak and they didn’t leave Faerie unless there was an emergency), elves, unicorns, and trolls. Sanha also learned that fairies were mostly female, though there were some male. Fairies could range from two inches short to over eleven inches tall. Most fairies, when not seen as fairies, were seen as butterflies, dragonflies or moths. Some of the smaller ones looked like flies, and he learned that a rare few looked like lesser seen insects. The book listed mantises, bees, and grasshoppers as the most common after butterflies, dragonflies, and moths.

Sanha continued walking, picking hallways he was pretty sure he hadn’t gone down yet. Most of the halls were barren. Dark brick walls stretched in every direction and the same weathered wood floors were under his feet at all times. Sanha went down a steep set of stairs and then up a spiral staircase. That spiral staircase led him into what was very clearly a library. Books normally didn’t interest Sanha, but the thought of learning something about his situation or the others was enough to make him scan the titles with his head tilted sideways.

“‘The History of Faerie’,” Sanha reads, his fingers traveling along the spine of the book. He pulls it out and carries it to a plush, red sofa. Sitting down lightly, he balances the book on his lap and flips through the first few pages carelessly. Even these books have meaningless content in the beginning, just like his school textbooks. Sanha begins reading, skipping over some paragraphs when the first sentences aren’t interesting. He finally finds what he had been expecting: answers about who Oberon and Marwig are.

_Oberon and Marwig grew up as brothers, their father being King Vyggo of Faerie. When it came time for a new king to be crowned, the kingdom was gifted to Oberon. Marwig, upset with not having been given the crown, created his own court. This was the birth of the Unseelie Court, the title of Seelie going to Oberon and those who stayed loyal to him._

Sanha nods a little, reading over the passage a few times before continuing. He frowns at the short sentence below what he had read.

_Reports of this come from fairies. Needs confirmation._

Sanha sighs and closes the book. He stands and sets the book on the sofa. There is a single door leading out from the room so he takes it and begins wandering again. It was easy for Sanha to get lost anywhere, and these halls were no exception. The only comfort was that Sanha had time to think things over. He didn’t know much, but why was he being punished instead of the fairies? It wasn’t his own fault that the fairies had liked him, was it? Sanha couldn’t even remember the fairies who had made him Fairy Touched. It seemed awfully rude to punish someone that was innocent. Sanha didn’t like this King Oberon, or even King Marwig. They both seemed like terrible..fairies? Were Oberon and Marwig fairies as well? Sanha laughed to himself as he imagined two tiny people being kings of anything at all.

The more Sanha wandered, the more lost he got. He was trying and failing to find his way back to the library. If he called Minhyuk for help, would his cellphone even get service? They were underground, after all. It’s his only chance at finding his way back. Sanha diales Minhyuk calmly. The brick wall is cold when he leans against it.

“Sanha, where did you go?” Minhyuk say as soon as he answers.

A smile sprouts on Sanha’s lips. Why does the sound of that question make him happy? “I need help.”

The tone of Minhyuk’s voice shifts quickly. “What? Are you hurt? Where are you? What happened? Did fairies get into the—”

Sanha’s laughter cuts off Minhyuk’s rapid questions. “I’m _fine_ , Minhyuk,” Sanha says. “I was walking around and I got lost. There’s a lot of hallways down here.”

Minhyuk breathes out, the breath of air sounding extremely relieved to Sanha. “Where are you?”

Sanha shrugs, looking both ways down the hall. “No idea. I can look in a room though.” He pulls himself off the wall and pushes open the first door he saw. “Uh, it’s just storage. No lights are on and there’s a lot of boxes.”

“I think I know where you’re at,” Minhyuk says. Sanha thought he heard a bird. Is Minhyuk still outside planting marigolds and primroses? “Don’t go anywhere. I mean it, Sanha. Just stay in that hall.”

“I won’t go anywhere,” Sanha tells, nodding. “I’ll stay right here.”

Minhyuk ends the call and Sanha stuffs his phone in his pocket. He stretches his arms over his head as he waits and he does a couple sets of lunges across the length of the hallway. There is a lot of room to work with. The hallway seemed wider here than outside the room he was sharing with Minhyuk. Sanha presses the side of his foot against the wall and stretches his other leg out as far as it can go. He counts how many planks it was until the other wall before straightening up. Four planks.

When Sanha hears footsteps, he quickly straightens up. He most definitely had not been practicing some of his favorite judo moves while pretending to take down human-sized fairies. His hands stuck in his pockets and he faces the direction that he heard Minhyuk coming from. When Minhyuk comes around the corner and catches sight of him, he looks like he is going to laugh.

“What were you just doing?” Minhyuk asks, and Sanha shakes his head rapidly.

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“You look like a child that was caught eating cake when their mom said _no more cake_.” Minhyuk smiles. For the second time that day, Sanha ignores the way that his heart reacts to that smile.

“I don’t have any cake,” Sanha says dumbly. He gives Minhyuk a sheepish smile and watches as the other boy he shakes his head.

“Come on, the way to civilization is this way.”

Sanha trails behind Minhyuk as they walk, just a few steps behind him. There is a lot he could’ve said in those minutes that Minhyuk spent leading him back towards the main area of the bunker, but Sanha said none of the things that came to mind. He stayed quiet. As they walked down a more familiar hallway (Sanha knew it was familiar, because the door to the training room was open and he could see sticks lining the wall), Sanha was sure that he heard Jinwoo and Bin speaking in the larger room. His listening was getting better. They came into view as soon as he rounded the corner of the hallway.

“Minhyuk, good,” Jinwoo says, catching sight of them. “Bin and I need to make a run for some supplies. Food, water, blood for Bin.” Jinwoo glances at Sanha when he says that, but Sanha had thought about Bin drinking blood enough for it to be almost normal.

“Anyway,” Jinwoo continues, “while we’re gone, it’ll be just the two of you. We can’t wait until Dongmin and Myungjun get back. It’ll be too late by then. The sun is almost down, so we’re going to take off now. You can hold down the fort, right?”

Minhyuk nods and glances up at Sanha, who also nods. “Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Minhyuk says. “We’ll stay down here, away from the fairies. Hopefully those flowers will work.”

Jinwoo and Bin lift their things (two backpacks and a cooler, the latter likely for the blood). Minhyuk walks with them to the bottom of the stairs while Sanha sits on the couch he had sat on every time until now. His guitar is exactly where he had left it, on top of all of the open books on the square coffee table. The heavy door at the top of the stairs shuts, and now Minhyuk and Sanha are alone.


	7. Computer Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, he gets him to talk.

Sanha is more aware of the silence in the bunker now that it’s just him and Minhyuk. He shifts on the couch with the wooden arms, looking at Minhyuk who is still looking up the stairs from the bottom. Did he lie about being able to hear his thoughts? His eyes move away from Minhyuk and he faces the coffee table again. Dongmin and Myungjun are probably just now arriving in Hongseong. They won’t get back until late. Will Jinwoo want them all to meet tonight? Sanha questions that and much more. What do the fairies want with him, exactly? He doesn’t recall anybody telling him. If the fairies had made him Fairy Touched, then why won’t Oberon just punish them? Sanha wonders if it’s possible to go to Faerie and just talk to Oberon about all of this misunderstanding.

“Do you wanna do something?”

Sanha looks up at Minhyuk standing at the other end of the couch. He has slouched down on the cushions unattractively, so he pushes himself up. “Um,” Sanha says. “I don’t know. Something like what?”

Minhyuk shrugs, and looks at the coffee table. “You play guitar?”

Sanha nods, eyes going to the case just like Minhyuk’s have. “Yeah. My dad and one of my brothers taught me at first, but now I take lessons.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Jinwoo picked you up from your guitar lesson place.” Minhyuk sits on the couch. He looks more comfortable than Sanha feels. There is awkwardness in the air between them. It’s like when Sanha had gone to a friend’s house, only to arrive there before his friend was back from the corner store and Sanha had been left in the room with only his friend’s parents to talk to. Minhyuk isn’t the parent of one of his friends, but it still feels as if he is.

“You have a brother,” Minhyuk says, interrupting Sanha’s thoughts. “I think I have a brother, too.”

Sanha looks sideways at Minhyuk. “You _think_? Did something happen to him?”

Minhyuk shakes his head and looks at the floor between his feet. “I never knew my family. I was taken away from them when I was really little, but I’ve seen their social media pages. My little brother.. His name is Junggeon.”

“My brother’s name is Jungha. They’re really similar,” Sanha points out, a small smile on his face. Minhyuk doesn’t smile, and he doesn’t speak. “We should go visit your brother one day.”

Minhyuk looks up at Sanha. “What? But what if—”

“They’ll love you,” Sanha says. “I mean, you seem pretty cool to me.” And that is very true. Sanha thinks Minhyuk is cool. “Like when you were on the phone with me earlier and you just kept talking so I would stay calm. That was really cool.”

The tiny smile Minhyuk gives him makes Sanha’s twice as wide. “What’s your brother like?” Minhyuk asks.

Sanha sighs. “Oh, boy. He’s annoying.” The two of them laugh, and Sanha delves into a series of stories of all the times that his brother Jungha has annoyed him. He tells Minhyuk about the time that Jungha had tossed him into the shallow end of a pool when he was fourteen. There was the family trip they had taken to Sobaeksan National Park when their dad had been obsessed with camping for two weeks. Jungha had made Sanha sleep outside their shared tent. The reason for Sanha’s broken arm when he was seven was Jungha pushing him off a swing at the highest point of it. Sanha tells Minhyuk about his brother’s son, too. His nephew, named Heonwoo, has just turned two years old. Sanha has babysat Heonwoo once, which resulted in Jungha telling Sanha that he was never allowed to babysit his nephew again. As Sanha explains details of his family, Minhyuk listens and smiles.

“Bin said earlier that you and him have known each other for a long time,” Sanha says eventually. “Would that make Bin like your brother?”

Minhyuk nods immediately. “Yeah, Bin is kind of like my brother. Neither of us have seen our families in a really long time. The two of us, though, we’ve been with each other for years. I think it’s been six years at least.”

“Six years?” Sanha exclaims, surprised at the number. “Did you two live on your own before you came to live with Jinwoo? Does Jinwoo just take in whoever?”

There is a pause before Minhyuk speaks. “Jinwoo likes to help people,” he says. “A lot of people come through here and stay when they have to get away. Most of them are like us. I mean, not exactly a regular person. He’s kind of started to help people make their own bunkers across the country. It’s like a charity, almost.”

“Why does he do it?” Sanha asks, eyes looking at the ceiling as he wonders out loud. He looks at Minhyuk. “Do you know?”

Minhyuk shakes his head. “I’m not sure. I guess something must have happened? I can’t imagine what would make Jinwoo so ready to help strangers, though.”

Sanha scoots down far enough that he can lean his head on the back of the couch comfortably. This causes his butt to almost fall off the cushion beneath him. “Do you think it was something bad?” he asks. The question isn’t directed at Minhyuk. He doesn’t expect Minhyuk to answer, but then he does.

“I think it might have been,” Minhyuk says. “I don’t want to think of Jinwoo going through something bad. He isn’t much older than I am, but he’s kind of like a dad. I don’t want to be a burden, you know?”

Sanha nods. He thinks he understands what Minhyuk means. Jinwoo seems to have done a lot for his friends, and Sanha is glad that Jinwoo has done for him what he has. They could have left him to fend for himself. Instead, they have all put their hands together and are helping Sanha get out of this mess. Sanha sits up suddenly. He turns on the couch until his left leg is up on the cushions.

“I have some questions,” he announces. Minhyuk looks amused. Sanha starts asking without waiting for Minhyuk to give him the go ahead. “What do the fairies want with me anyway?”

“Well,” Minhyuk says, “you technically broke the deal.”

“But I didn’t—”

Minhyuk holds up a hand, silencing Sanha. “The fairies probably want to take you to Faerie permanently. Humans can go to Faerie, but they don’t last long. The books—” Minhyuk sticks his foot out and taps his toes against a book on the coffee table “—say that you’ll be alive for about a month. After a week of exposure to that much magic, though, you forget who you were anyway. It’s really awful.”

Sanha stares at the book Minhyuk had moved. “Why are they so mean?” Sanha asks, his voice quiet and the question just to himself. “Wait.” He looks at Minhyuk. “Why not just punish the fairies? I mean, it was really their fault.”

“Yeah, but fairies would never do that.” Minhyuk sits up a little more than he had been, his body turning to face Sanha more. “Fairies are really proud. They love being fairies. They think they’re the best thing there is. If they can avoid punishing their own kind, they will always do that and put the blame on someone else.”

Sanha frowns and leans sideways, his left shoulder digging into the cushion and his head lying on top of it. “What if we went to talk to Oberon in Faerie?” Sanha asks. “We could just explain everything. I’ll even promise to never look at Faerie again.”

“It’s a good idea,” Minhyuk says, and Sanha thinks he finally has a solution. He sits up, beaming, until Minhyuk speaks again. “Only Fae and Fairy Touched humans can go into Faerie. I won’t— _we_ won’t let you and Callah go into Faerie alone. After all, you’re kind of helpless.”

“I am not!” Sanha says indignantly. “I know judo!”

“Oh, yeah?” Minhyuk challenges. “Show me some judo, then, Tough Guy.”

Sanha frowns and gets up. “Fine, I will.” He pauses. “I can’t show judo moves on just the air, though. I mean, I can, but it’s not the same.”

Minhyuk laughs, and Sanha’s frown deepens because the laugh sounds like Minhyuk is teasing him. Sanha sits down heavily on the couch.

“You were actually going to do it, weren’t you?” Minhyuk teases. “I know taekwondo myself. What if you did the moves on me?”

Sanha looks at Minhyuk skeptically. “I don’t want to hurt you, though. Plus, you already said that _you_ won’t let me go to Faerie. Why should I show my judo if you won’t let me go anyway?”

Is Minhyuk blushing? “I said _we_ won’t let you go,” Minhyuk clarifies. “Which _we_ won’t. Even if you had all the power in the world, you would be going to talk to Oberon. His magic is really strong. He probably has the strongest fairy magic, second only to maybe Marwig.”

“Wait, is fairy magic different from human magic? Like, the magic that Jinwoo knows?” Sanha gets comfortable on the couch, setting his elbow on top of the back cushion and putting his chin in his palm.

“They come from the same place,” Minhyuk says. “Or as far as we know, they do. Some books say that fairies and humans used the same magic up until the mid 1300s. Humans would become Fairy Touched and spend 167 hours in Faerie. That’s just one hour under a week, and the whole losing your memory in a week thing is pretty exact.”

“So all the early witches and wizards were Fairy Touched?” Sanha shook his head. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“That’s because it’s not right,” Minhyuk tells. “The Fairy Touched ones would go to Faerie to learn magic. They would come back to our realm and lead fairies to children until the children became Fairy Struck. Then the Fairy Touched ones would teach magic to the children who were Fairy Struck. Eventually, though, they found out a way to practice magic without having to go to Faerie. That gave us early sorcerers and sorceresses.”

“Sorcerers and sorceresses,” Sanha says, laughing a little. “That’s hard to say.”

Minhyuk smiles before he continues speaking. “It is. The sorcerers used what was basically fairy magic for a really long time. I mean, like, ancient Greece and Egypt times until early times in the last millennium. All accounts point to Merlin as the earliest modern sorcerer. I think one of these books is actually about him.”

Sanha watches Minhyuk as he gets up from the couch and begins moving the books on the table. “We had to shut down all of our power in the bunker for about three weeks last year,” Minhyuk says. “I picked this book and took it upstairs with me. I actually read the whole thing in that time. It was pretty interesting.”

When Minhyuk sits back down, it’s with a large book. The cover is deep red and Sanha can see gold etching on the front. He moves, scooting across the couch until his hip is almost pressed into Minhyuk’s. “It’s just called ‘Merlin’?” Sanha asks.

Minhyuk smiles, opening the book. “Yeah, it’s not the most creative title.” He flips a few pages, and Sanha looks to where Minhyuk is pointing.

“All accounts list Merlin as semi-immortal,” Minhyuk explains. “He’s not alive anymore, he’s buried in some unmarked grave in Wales, I think. Anyway, he lived for close to a thousand years. He changed the way humans used magic. This was the start of real dark magic. One of Merlin’s students, Morgan le Fay, used her magic to get her to be queen. She’s where things started going wrong.”

“Dumb Morgan,” Sanha comments, and he senses more than hears Minhyuk’s soft laughter. “What about Merlin’s other students?”

“His first student was Michael Scot in the late 1100s. He was a good one. He didn’t live for very long.” Minhyuk pauses. “Merlin’s most famous student is Nicolas Flamel.”

Sanha’s brows furrow, and he looks at Minhyuk. “Nicolas Flamel? Like, the character in Harry Potter?”

Minhyuk laughs. “Yeah, but not exactly. The Philosopher’s Stone bit is real, but not much else. He was born in France around the time that Merlin started to really make waves in the magic community, in the early fourteenth century. Flamel was reportedly around thirty years old when he made the Stone, but he didn’t use it until he was a lot older, around sixty. He faked his own death, which I think is the coolest part about his story.” Minhyuk looks at Sanha, a small smile on his face.

“He got married, but they never had kids,” Minhyuk continues. “The last big mention of Flamel and his wife is from the seventeenth century. If you go poking around on the internet, you can find some people who claim to have met the man. I saw one story that put him in India about 20 years ago.”

“Wait, 20 years ago?” Sanha asks, not quite believing him. “That would make him, like, almost 700 years old wouldn’t it?”

“He was born in 1330, and 20 years ago was—” Minhyuk pauses, doing math in his head. Sanha watches as Minhyuk’s finger writes invisible numbers on the page of the book. He actually has really nice hands.

“Yeah,” Minhyuk says, pulling Sanha out of his thoughts. “If he’s still alive today, he would be 687 years old. That’s almost 700 years, you were right.”

“Didn’t you say Callah is 300 years old?” Sanha asks. “Do you think she ever met Nicolas Flamel?”

Minhyuk laughs. “Yeah, I guess she might have. She’s protected by Oberon, though, that’s why she’s alive still. It has nothing to do with the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“I wonder if Oberon would bother protecting me,” Sanha asks, his voice dragging. “This probably won’t end well, will it?”

“What?” Minhyuk says, sounding surprised. “We’ll figure something out, Sanha. I’m—We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you. We’re going to do whatever it takes.”

There’s a silence that comes between them. Sanha is staring at the page of the book that is still open on Minhyuk’s lap. If they couldn’t figure this out, would Sanha live his life in this bunker? He will probably never get to see his family again if they don’t fix it.

“The rest of you are safe, right?” Sanha asks, and his voice is quiet. “I mean, because of the deal. That deal still stands, right? Fairies can’t hurt you?”

Minhyuk nods, though he seems unsure. “Yeah, the deal between Oberon and humans protects us from the fairies. If the fairies hurt us, Oberon has to punish them.”

“What if I just turn myself in?” Sanha asks. “I mean, it would solve the problem.”

“No way,” Minhyuk says immediately, actually talking over the last part of Sanha’s comment. “That is _not_ happening. The fairies will have to carry the rest of us off before they take you away.”

Sanha feels just the slightest bit better at Minhyuk’s protests. From just yesterday, Sanha has gotten kind of attached to Minhyuk. He is pretty sure that Minhyuk has said _I won’t_ instead of _we won’t_ at least two times now. The fact that Minhyuk wants to protect him makes Sanha trust Minhyuk even more.

“Do you promise?” Sanha asks. “Can you promise that this will be okay in the end?”

Minhyuk looks at Sanha. He has to look down at Sanha a little, because Sanha has slumped into the couch. “I promise,” he says. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Sanha looks back at Minhyuk for a moment before nodding, satisfied with the response he gets. His eyes travel to focus on his guitar case. Are his cheeks hot? Sanha raises a hand and rubs at them. He needs to block his cheeks from having blood vessels so he won’t blush.

 _Block_. Sanha looks at Minhyuk quickly. “What if we tell Oberon that we’ll block some of my memories? The ones where I’ve seen fairies and talked to them and stuff?”

Minhyuk shakes his head. Sanha waits for the explanation. “You have a small immunity to magic because you’re Fairy Touched, remember? Any walls that are put up in your mind by magic will just be torn down over time. Oberon will know that, too.”

Sanha sighs and leans his head back, looking up at the ceiling. It’s a dark concrete and there are a few scratches here and there. Sanha wonders just how many things these concrete ceilings have seen. How many secrets do they know? If he doesn’t have much time, Sanha wants to learn as many secrets as he can.

“Are tritons rare?” Sanha asks suddenly. “Myungjun is a triton, right? When he said siren and naiad, I kind of understood what he meant. The only triton I know of is the one in The Little Mermaid.”

A coughing laugh comes out of Minhyuk. Sanha looks at him lazily, smiling a little. “I think they’re rare,” Minhyuk says once he gets his laugh under control. “The original triton was Triton, the Greek god. I looked them up when I first met Myungjun, too, but there weren’t very many answers on the internet. You’d have to ask Myungjun for specifics.”

Sanha nods. “What about lycans? In movies, werewolves are always shown with really good, like, hearing and smelling. Does that apply to Dongmin, too?”

“Kind of,” Minhyuk says. “As far as I know, his hearing is really good in both forms. He can see in the dark really well, too, also in both forms. I think the smelling only applies to his wolf self.”

Satisfied, Sanha preps for another question. “I wanted to ask earlier, but I got cut off. Then I was thinking, and I don’t think I want to ask Bin, anyway. He scares me. You said you’ve known him for a long time. Has Bin ever killed someone before?”

“He did,” Minhyuk says, much easier than Sanha expects. “It was a long time ago, and it’s why he only drinks out of bags. He might have said it when he was introducing himself. Bin doesn’t hide very much about his past.”

“Does he have a long past?” Sanha asks. “Jinwoo said that Bin is immortal, and Myungjun, too.”

“Well, Bin has been a vampire for about 11 years,” Minhyuk says. “The way Bin explained it to me, he said that vampires who are bitten at a young age just keep growing until their bodies are done. Then their bodies do this weird thing where it fixes all of the things wrong with your body. So if you had diabetes and were bitten at age sixteen, you would keep growing with your diabetes. But once you stop growing, your body would fix the diabetes.”

“Wow,” Sanha murmurs. “That’s cool. Why doesn’t everybody just become a vampire? It would probably stop things like, uh, cancer and stuff, too, wouldn’t it?”

Minhyuk shrugs. “I don’t know. It sounds like it would, though. Bin is one of just a few vampires who actually are nice, though. We met this group of vampires before. They didn’t like that Bin didn’t drink from humans directly. They chased us for a long time. That’s what led us to Jinwoo.”

Sanha nods, quiet. His most pressing questions have been answered, so he doesn’t say anything for a long time. Minhyuk doesn’t either. The silence between them now isn’t as awkward as it was earlier. He thinks at least an hour must have passed since Jinwoo and Bin left. It is probably dark out now. Sanha withdraws his phone and sends a text to his mom. He tells her that he skipped his guitar lesson because he had forgotten his bag at school. That seems like a reasonable excuse.

As the silence stretches, Sanha finds himself searching for a question to ask or a comment to make. There isn’t much that seems relevant. He twists his head and looks at Minhyuk, who is reading the book in his lap. After a moment, Minhyuk catches his eye. His expression is open, like he’s caught off guard, and Sanha thinks that he likes seeing Minhyuk look at him like that, like there are no secrets between them. The expression only lasts for a moment, but Sanha holds onto it. With Minhyuk looking at him, though, he blurts out a question.

“Is it fun to be telekinetic?”

Minhyuk smiles. For the first time, Sanha has gotten Minhyuk to talk about himself. Sanha listens as Minhyuk explains everything. He only has to think to make something happen. He has sometimes played pranks on the older boys using his telekinesis. Once, they had someone stay with them that used magic in a way that made them almost telekinetic. The more Minhyuk goes on, the more Sanha finds that he wants to know as much as he can. He begins to make a mental list of questions to ask Minhyuk at a better time, after all of this fairy mess is over. When he’s safe just like Minhyuk promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're liking this so far, you should come scream at me on tumblr.
> 
> http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/ask


	8. The Calm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is always a calm before the storm.

Sanha feels a hand shaking his shoulder lightly. He squeezes his eyes shut, not wanting to wake up from his nap. He deserves this nap. Minhyuk had told him so before he walked Sanha to the bedroom. His bed is warm and comfortable but the hand doesn’t stop shaking him.

“Sanha,” Minhyuk says quietly, and Sanha cracks open his eyes at the sound of this friendly voice.

“What time is it?” Sanha asks groggily, turning his body in the bed. He pushes himself up on his elbow, and he imagines that Minhyuk’s hand lingers longer than necessary on his shoulder.

“Just a little before midnight,” Minhyuk says. “I made them wait as long as possible, but they want you to meet Callah tonight. She has some news that she’ll only give us if you’re in the room, too. Plus, you skipped dinner. You need to eat.”

Sanha frowns and sits up all the way. The blanket falls off him and gathers on his lap. He shivers and lifts it back up on himself. “It’s cold,” he murmurs. Sanha slides out from the bed and maneuvers the blanket, wrapping it around himself like a cape. He’s so tall that the blanket barely hits him at the middle of his calves.

Minhyuk’s hand is gentle on his back as he’s guided. They pass the couches where they have sat most of the times until now. There are voices drifting out from the room that Sanha has only passed through until now. As they walk in, Sanha squints. The lights are bright. Is every single light on in the room? Sanha thinks so. He doesn’t resist as Minhyuk leads him to one of the three brown, matching couches. His hands work on their own and take the plate of food from Minhyuk. He starts eating just as words begin to be spoken.

“Sanha, please,” Jinwoo says softly. “Just a moment? This is Callah.”

Sanha has forgotten that he is supposed to meet a 300 year old woman. Is she wrinkly? He looks up from his plate, the blanket sliding off his shoulder as he does.

She is not wrinkly. In fact, she looks young. She looks young enough to be friends with Sanha. He squints. “Are you really 300 years old?”

Minhyuk chokes back a laugh and Sanha notices Bin bend his head, a smile on his face. Callah doesn’t look at all fazed by the question. “I was eighteen when Oberon cursed me,” she says. “Or saved me. My opinion depends on the day.”

Sanha smiles a little. He likes Callah.

“You said you had news for us,” Jinwoo says, turning his attention to Callah. Sanha goes back to eating as he listens. “I’m guessing it’s important since you wanted all of us to hear it at once.”

“You would be right,” Callah answers. “I don’t travel to Faerie anymore, but I have a few fairies who I remain friends with. They bring me information when there’s information to be told. Oberon has banned a group of fairies from reentering Faerie until this passes over.”

“He did _what_?” Myungjun asks loudly. “He’s never done that before.”

“We’ve never been in a situation like this before,” Callah says. “This group of fairies are the fairies responsible for making Sanha into a Fairy Touched human.”

Sanha stops lifting his fork to his mouth halfway. “Wait, really?”

Callah nods shortly. “I have been aware for a while of a group of fairies who are against the deal. It’s not in the way that they want the deal to end so that they can take humans to Faerie again. They believe that humans should be allowed to be Fairy Touched or Struck and not be punished for it.”

“Does this order of fairies have a name?” Dongmin asks. “Could we request their help? If Oberon sees that we have Fae on our side, maybe he’ll make whatever punishment it is be lesser than necessary.”

“Punishment?” Sanha asks, though the word is muffled by the food in his mouth. He swallows the food and coughs, clearing his throat. “Punishment?” he repeats. “They can’t just punish me for nothing.”

“Unfortunately,” Callah says, “I don’t see a way out of this that won’t end in some sort of bargain where Oberon feels that he’s come out on top. Oberon would accept wiping your memories, all of them, as the bare minimum.”

Sanha has suddenly lost his appetite. He leans forward and sets the ceramic plate on the glass table, causing a bit of noise. There’s a hand at his shoulder. Sanha glances over to see Minhyuk replace the blanket on his shoulder.

“Well, we aren’t going to let that happen,” Jinwoo says. There are solid looks of agreement from everybody in the room. Sanha glances between all of them then directs his eyes at the uneaten food on his plate.

“We should continue this in the morning.” Sanha looks at Myungjun thankfully. The man nods in his direction, the smallest of smiles flickering across his face. “Callah, I can show you to the room you’ll be staying in.”

“We should all get some rest,” Dongmin says. “It’s been a long day.”

Sanha sits huddled under his blanket as he watches Myungjun lead Callah out of the room. There’s a quiet settled between the five of them left. He is pretty sure that all of them are looking at him, but he can’t make himself meet their eyes.

“Sanha,” Dongmin says, softly. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Callah is right about Oberon. He _is_ going to want some kind of bargain where he thinks he’s coming out on top.”

“Am I going to lose my memories?” Sanha asks. His voice is quiet, barely above a whisper.

“No way,” Minhyuk says, and he says it so confidently that Sanha can’t help but look at him. Minhyuk moves, sitting closer to Sanha than he had been. His hand lands on Sanha’s back, strong and comforting. “Nobody is losing their memories,” Minhyuk says. “I don’t—I mean, we don’t care what Oberon wants.”

“He’s right,” Bin says, speaking up for the first time. Sanha looks over at him and sees the bag of chips in his hands. “We aren’t going to let anything like that happen.”

******

Sanha wakes up the next morning in a room without Minhyuk. He sits in his bed for a while, thinking. How are they going to save him? Blocking specific memories won’t work. He can’t go to Faerie and speak with Oberon. What if he has certain memories wiped? Would Oberon allow that? Sanha digs fresh clothes out of his backpack and takes a shower before he leaves the room. It’s quiet.

Sanha finds the training room empty, as well as Bin and Dongmin’s room. The computer room is empty. Nobody sits on the three mismatching couches, though the books in the room have been picked up off the floor and arranged in stacks. Sanha thinks briefly that they look like the barrels horses ride around in shows sometimes. He keeps walking, his socked feet seeming to press down on every single creaky floor board, and finds no one in the room where he had sat the night before. On the large table in the room with the kitchen is a covered plate. Sanha can see strips of bacon under the cover, and what he thinks are pancakes. They probably are pancakes, judging by the syrup on the table.

He finds a plate and warms the pancakes in the microwave, yawning as he waits. The syrup oozes out of the bottle with an intoxicating smell. There are sausages chopped up under the cover along with the bacon, and Sanha uses those to mop up the extra syrup on his plate. There’s a lot of time for Sanha to think. He can think about his family, about the possible outcome of the disaster his life has spiraled into. Instead, Sanha thinks about nothing.

He probably spends about twenty minutes eating until he feels like he just can’t move. With nobody around, Sanha hums as he washes his dishes. He puts the leftover bacon in a plastic box and leaves it on the counter.

As he walks out into the main room again, he sees a door he hasn’t noticed before. It’s tucked into the wall right beside the stairwell. Sanha walks to it, tugs it open, and sees another set of stairs leading down. He had gotten lost down on the next floor. Sanha shuts the door, not wanting to return to the labyrinth down there. As he walks towards the the hall which leads back to the room he is sharing, the door at the top of the stairs to the house opens up and Sanha hears laughter.

He stops walking, turning and waiting for the owners of the voices to show up. Myungjun is leading the pack, followed by Bin and Minhyuk. They stop when they see Sanha.

“Good, you’re finally awake,” Minhyuk says, continuing to walk towards Sanha. “We left Callah, Jinwoo, and Dongmin upstairs. Callah has been in contact with those fairies she brought up last night. We have to build a fairy mound now.”

Sanha’s brows pull together. “A fairy _what_ now?”

“A fairy mound,” Minhyuk repeats. “Come on, some of the stuff we need is downstairs. I’ll explain.” Minhyuk walks past Sanha, and Sanha jogs a little to catch up to him. They turn into the hallway and keep going. The stairs Sanha had taken the day before were at the end of the hall.

“Fairy mounds were, originally, places of entry from Faerie to our world,” Minhyuk says as they walk. There’s a hop in his step that’s brightening Sanha’s mood slowly. “Fairy mounds that get broken down, well, they get closed off to Faerie. These broken fairy mounds can be rebuilt, though, and the fairies can travel from one broken fairy mound to another.”

“Why are we building a fairy mound, then?” Sanha asks. He grabs the metal railing as they go down the stairs.

“Because human-constructed fairy mounds work just like regular fairy mounds. And if there’s a fairy mound here, we can bring the fairies that made you Fairy Touched here without having to wait.” Minhyuk stops walking and Sanha keeps going, but only for a few steps. There’s a goofy smile across Minhyuk’s lips. Sanha raises a brow, though he isn’t able to fight his own smile.

“There it is,” Minhyuk says. Sanha guesses he means his smile. “If we can get these fairies on our side, then Oberon’s fairies will have to go through those fairies to get to us.” Minhyuk resumes walking and Sanha follows.

“Won’t Oberon’s fairies just go right through ours, though?” Sanha asks. “They’re just fairies. They can’t be that strong, can they?”

“Not right now, they’re not,” Minhyuk says. “But we have a secret.” It’s like he’s going to burst into giggles at any moment. As they walk side by side, Minhyuk pokes Sanha’s ribs, making Sanha jump. “You.”

“Me?” Sanha looks at Minhyuk weirdly. “What do I have to do with anything? I’m not a secret, in case you forgot. I’ve gotten attacked by fairies already, _twice_.”

Minhyuk waves his hand. “Not that. You’re Fairy Touched. If two Fairy Touched humans cast the same spell, it can bring fairies from their small size to the size of a tall human. The tallest fairies will probably end up being about as tall as you are.”

“Wait, really?” Sanha smiles a little. “So, it’ll be kind of like toys coming to life?”

Minhyuk laughs, and Sanha’s heart soars. “Yeah, kind of. But first, we have to build the fairy mound. You can help us carry supplies, but you’ll still need to stay down here in the bunker. The big door at the top is warded against fairies, and they can’t come down here unless we let them in. Which we won’t, of course.”

Sanha nods. As they walk, a question formulates in Sanha’s mind. Does he dare ask it and risk ruining both of their good moods? He does. “Does this mean we have the upper hand?”

“Sort of,” Minhyuk says. The smile on his face is so wide and happy that Sanha, for the first time in almost a full day, thinks they can really pull this off. If they keep going, build up their defenses, and come up with a way to make Oberon and his fairies back off, Sanha thinks that they can fix everything.


	9. A Foreboding Approach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had to happen eventually, and now it is happening. They're coming.

The guitar is propped against Sanha’s leg as he sits on the green couch. He picks at the strings, the sound echoing throughout the large, brick-walled room. Bin is somewhere in the bunker while the other four are above ground with Callah, building the fairy mound. Sanha had almost begged Minhyuk to keep him company, but he knows that all hands are needed on deck above to get the fairy mound done as soon as possible. He had really expected today to be full of movement, but he has spent a majority of his time just waiting.

Sanha only hears Minhyuk when he calls his name. “Sanha! Sanha, come on!”

Minhyuk is running into the room and he skids to a stop by the couches. “The fairy mound is almost done. Jinwoo said it’s probably safe enough for you to come up and greet the fairies who come through first. He said it’s a good idea, even.”

“Really?” Sanha asks, already beginning to stand up. “But what if Oberon’s fairies come through, too?”

Minhyuk shakes his head. “Callah said she’s taking care of that. I don’t know the specifics, but she said none of Oberon’s fairies will come through the mound. Come _on_ , Sanha!”

Sanha laughs and follows him. They sprint up the stairs, Minhyuk’s legs moving quickly and Sanha skipping as many steps as he can on the way up. When they finally reach the top of the stairs that empty into a grand kitchen, Sanha is ashamed to say that he’s out of breath. He leans against the counter beside Minhyuk. Laughter is bubbling up in his chest and Minhyuk taps their arms together.

“This way,” Minhyuk says after a moment. Sanha separates himself from the counter and follows the shorter boy towards the back of the house. Looking now, Sanha can see evidence of the boys’ lives in the house. There are short book stacks in places that a person wouldn’t normally expect.

Sanha’s train of thought is interrupted. He bumps into Minhyuk, having not noticed that the other stopped. The natural light spilling into the room is just barely enough. Clouds fill the sky. Sanha steps around Minhyuk to stand behind him. Jinwoo, Dongmin, and Callah are in the backyard. He watches as Jinwoo and Dongmin put the finishing bits of clay on the stones that Sanha and Minhyuk had carried earlier. Minhyuk had told Sanha that the stones came from a real fairy mound that had been destroyed and left unfixed, and that’s why this will work at all. There’s a moment after Jinwoo and Dongmin step back where nothing happens. Callah kneels in the grass beside the crudely made stone structure. Her body is partly blocking Sanha’s view, so he leans towards Minhyuk as he tries to see better.

A streak of orange zooms out, passing Callah and circling the area. Jinwoo waves the fairy down. Sanha watches carefully as Jinwoo’s hand waves over her petite body. For just a moment, the fairy is encased in a green glow before it fades and she takes flight again.

“What was that?” Sanha asks, glancing at Minhyuk before looking outside again. A fairy with small brown wings comes through next. He watches as the fairy zips around Callah’s head before landing on Jinwoo’s open palm.

“We planted marigolds and primroses, remember?” Minhyuk says. He gestures to the fence line, pointing out bushes of yellow flowers. “Fairies can’t stand the smell of them, and sometimes they even get sick if they’re around it for too long. The spell Jinwoo’s doing just makes them kind of immune to the smell.”

Sanha nods a little in acknowledgement. He stares as fairy after fairy zooms into view. Each one of them does a small circle of the backyard before alighting on Jinwoo’s palm. Dongmin stands closer to the fairy mound, and Callah is still crouched in front of it. Minhyuk taps Sanha’s arm, pointing. The orange-winged fairy that had flown through first has landed on the outer windowsill. She stares at Sanha and he can’t help but stare back.

There’s a tiny voice, and Sanha’s instincts react. He takes a step back, putting Minhyuk between himself and the fairy. The fairy lifts her hands. At the sign of peace, Sanha relaxes. These fairies are here to help. He has to remember that. Minhyuk glances at him, quiet again, and smiles.

Two more fairies have joined the first, one with black wings unlike Sanha has ever seen on a bug and the other with wings so translucent that Sanha almost thinks that there are no wings at all. He squats by the window, his face now level with the fairies who stand outside the window. The orange one points at the bottom of the window and makes a movement with her hands.

“I think she wants me to open the window,” Sanha says, glancing at Minhyuk. “Is that alright?”

Minhyuk nods, stepping over to do it. “They can’t come inside unless we let them, and none of them have that clearance yet.”

The window opens up and Sanha feels the humidity hit his face. He sighs at the feeling. The fairies smile, and (Sanha has to be imagining it) they look almost timid. A beat of silence passes.

“Um, hi,” Sanha says, softly. The fairies visibly relax.

“We are really happy to be here, Sanha,” the orange fairy says. “My name is Highday.”

“Highday?” Sanha asks. “That’s kind of a weird name.”

“Our names wouldn’t make sense to you,” Highday says. Her wings shake a little when she speaks. “I’m Highday, and my friends are Leafgem and Crystalwind.” Sanha glances at the two fairies. Leafgem is the one with the deep black wings, and Crystalwing’s wings shimmer in the light. He nods a little at both of them.

“We want to help in as many ways as we can,” Highday continues. “Please, if you request anything, tell us and we will follow you.”

Minhyuk squats beside Sanha. “What are they saying?” The fairies glance at Minhyuk, who smiles. Sanha’s brows pull together.

“You can’t understand them?”

“I don’t speak fairy,” Minhyuk says. “But you do, since you’re Fairy Touched.”

“What?” Sanha asks, looking at Minhyuk. “I wasn’t speaking fairy. They weren’t either. Can’t you—”

“It didn’t sound like it to you because you’re Fairy Touched,” Minhyuk explains. “Jinwoo can speak fairy, too, but he knows the difference. It must be because you’re Fairy Touched that you can’t make out the difference between them.”

Sanha nods a little. Jinwoo whistles and Sanha watches as Highday, Leafgem, and Crystalwing take flight. Minhyuk stands and closes the window. Sanha can’t count how many fairies are hovering in the air in the backyard. There has to be at least a hundred, if not more. He can’t hear their wings, but he can imagine how they sound.

“We need to get you back underground,” Minhyuk says.

Sanha sighs as he stands. “Can’t I stay up here? I have fairy protectors now, and the marigold and primroses should keep away Oberon’s fairies, right?”

“The flowers aren’t guaranteed to keep them away,” Minhyuk answers. “Plus, there’s something _you_ need to be doing right now.”

“There is?” Sanha follows Minhyuk as he begins to walk towards the kitchen again. “What do I need to do?”

“You need to change clothes, first of all.” Minhyuk turns around and picks at Sanha’s shirt, tugging it away from his body a little. Sanha can’t help the blush that rises to his cheeks. Minhyuk laughs and continues down the stairs.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Sanha asks. He looks down at his sweat pants and the large shirt. His feet are covered by pink, low cut socks.

“You have to be in tighter clothes when learning magic,” Minhyuk says. “That’s what Jinwoo makes all the sorcerers do when they come in here. Sometimes magic requires a lot of movement, and—”

“Am I going to be learning magic?” Sanha asks loudly, his voice echoing. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. You can’t do magic if you get caught up in your shirt. Callah will be down in a minute, once they finish giving orders to the fairies.” Minhyuk stops at the bottom of the stairs and waits for Sanha. “The two of you are going to do a spell that’ll make the fairies the size of humans.”

“Why can’t Jinwoo do it with her?” Sanha asks, stopping with only a few feet between himself and Minhyuk. Why is he so aware of the space between them? “I don’t know how to do magic.”

“Not yet, you don’t, but you will after today.” Minhyuk begins walking again. “Remember how I said Fairy Touched humans would go into Faerie to learn how to do magic? Every person that’s ever been Fairy Touched has been able to do some kind of magic on some level, even if that level is really small.”

“What does that have to do with me needing to do the spell instead of Callah?” Sanha has to measure his steps so he won’t pass Minhyuk. The height difference between them is cute. _No, not cute,_ Sanha thinks. _It’s normal._

“Jinwoo can’t do fairy magic because he isn’t Fairy Touched. But you’re Fairy Touched and so is Callah, so you two can do it, together.”

“Fairy magic,” Sanha mumbles. He walks the rest of the way with Minhyuk back to their shared room in quiet and searches through his backpack for the proper clothes when they arrive.

“Are skinny jeans okay?” Sanha asks, lifting a pair out of his backpack. The unfold as he lifts them and he holds them out for Minhyuk to see. “They’re tight fitting, so they won’t get in the way.”

Minhyuk doesn’t say anything, and when Sanha turns around, he realizes that Minhyuk is looking at his computer screen. Sanha sighs. “Minhyuk,” he says, catching the other’s attention. “That computer isn’t more interesting than I am, is it? I’m going to do _magic_.”

“Sanha, come look at this.” Minhyuk waves him over. With a sigh, Sanha sets his pants on the small bed and crosses the room.

Displayed on the computer screen is a map with Seoul as the center. It spreads as far South as Suwon and as far North as Yangju. There are blue dots on the otherwise black and white screen. Minhyuk doesn’t say anything, and Sanha can’t make sense of the map.

“What is it?” Sanha asks.

Minhyuk is shaking his head. “Each one of these dots is a group of fairies. There are sensors set up all over the area. They can measure the magic in the fairies and it sends a signal—that’s not the important part. Look.”

Sanha waits as Minhyuk taps a button at the top of the screen. The screen shifts and the dots move. From Yangju to Suwon, every blue dot is moving in the direction of Guri, in the direction of the bunker. Sanha’s heart is caught in his throat.

“The fairies, they’re coming _here_?” Sanha says, and his voice shakes. Minhyuk touches his arm gently.

“Stay down here,” Minhyuk tells him. “I have to go get Jinwoo and the others. Sanha, look at me.”

Sanha tears his eyes away from the computer screen. Minhyuk’s expression is solid. There’s no questioning his intention.

“Stay. Here.” Minhyuk grabs the laptop and runs out of the room.

Sanha watches Minhyuk run down the hall for a moment. Once Minhyuk turns out of the hallway, Sanha moves. He changes his sweats out for the skinny jeans and replaces his baggy black shirt with a tight fit navy colored one. Sanha kneels, feeling under the bed for the bag of iron powder that he had hidden there the previous day. His fingers bump the bag and he stands up with it in hand. By the door he sticks his feet into his shoes and he dashes out of the room.

The armory isn’t hard to find, but the box is. He had forgotten that it’s on the bottom shelf. As he stands up with as many bags as he can manage, Dongmin is stepping into the room. They both pause for a brief moment before Dongmin flashes a smile.

Dongmin had been prepared with larger bags, so they each carry two towards the main room. Bin is sitting on the floor, guns spread out in front of him. Sanha stops in his tracks.

“They’re not loaded with actual bullets,” Bin says without looking up from loading another gun. “Have you ever heard of rock salt bullets?” He looks up now, and Sanha shakes his head.

Bin is smiling when he refocuses. “These bullets are kind of like capsules.” He holds one up for Sanha to see, but he only has a brief moment to inspect it before Bin is stuffing the bullet in one of the eight handguns. “If you shoot a hard surface with them, the iron powder will explode in a cloud. It works like those pouches, but it has a much further range.”

“Are we going to have to use them?” Sanha asks, his voice rushed. “Fairies can’t get into the basement, right? I thought someone said that the door is warded.”

“It _was_ warded,” Bin says. “Jinwoo took down the warding so we could let in the fairies that are on our side. Callah’s magic is fairy magic, so she can’t help him. Fairy magic doesn’t use warding spells. That’s why we’re—”

“Sanha!”

He looks in the direction of Dongmin, who is hurriedly waving him over. “Go,” Bin says, and so he does. Dongmin is sitting with Minhyuk on the couches, the bags of iron powder covering the table. Sanha realizes that his guitar case (likely with his guitar inside) has been shoved under one of the couches. He passes his two packed bags to Dongmin, who begins unloading them onto the table. Minhyuk is making quick work of packing iron powder into clear pellets like the one Bin had shown him.

“What should I do?” Sanha asks, looking between Minhyuk and Dongmin. Dongmin is packing pellets now, too.

“Come with me.” Sanha looks up, seeing Jinwoo walking over. “I have an idea, but I need your help.”

“Did you get the warding up?” Minhyuk asks, looking up from the task at hand. Jinwoo nods, and Minhyuk’s entire body relaxes.

Sanha swallows around the lump in his throat. He hesitates to follow Jinwoo. The reason they are all under the possibility of being in danger is because of Sanha. He wants to run towards the stairs and throw himself outside, just for the sake of the rest of them being safe. His brain is turning, searching for a way out of this situation. Everything that he has seen, everything that he knows is now real, and he can’t—

“Jinwoo, I have an idea,” Sanha says, standing up quickly. 

“Great,” Jinwoo responds. “You can tell me about it as we walk. You need to help me prepare the mirror.”

“The mirror?” Dongmin asks, sounding surprised. Sanha doesn’t understand why.

“Why a mirror?” Sanha asks, looking at Jinwoo.

A grim look comes across Jinwoo’s face. Sanha doesn’t like it at all. Jinwoo is silent for a moment before he speaks. “We’re going to contact Oberon.”


	10. Demands from Oberon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As unfortunate as it may be, the demands made have to be met.

After a long hour of Sanha elaborating on his plan and helping Jinwoo and Callah set up the mirror, they are ready. Sanha isn’t sure what to expect. The mirror, when he first saw it, had looked like any other mirror. Now, with iron powder in every crevice of the simple frame and in every edge around the frame, the mirror looks dirty. Sanha stands across the room with Callah at his side as Jinwoo draws symbols on the walls with chalk.

“They’re for protection,” Callah says, and Sanha looks at her. “The signs originated in alchemy, which I know a fair bit of myself.”

“Each one has a different meaning?” Sanha asks, wanting clarification.

Callah nods. “He’s drawn the symbol for iron, which will keep Oberon from making the mirror into an interdimensional portal. That's the one above and below the mirror, and directly to the left and right of it. The iron on the mirror itself would hurt Oberon, but it wouldn’t stop him entirely.

“The straight lined ones are runes,” Callah continues. “The long one with a flick at the top and bottom is for defense, and the other is for communication.” She pauses. “Jinwoo doesn’t give himself enough credit. He’s quite smart.”

Sanha smiles a little and watches Jinwoo put the chalk on the table. It starts to roll away, but he stops it with a quick hand. The bowl in his hand has white paint in it to match the chalk. He takes the paintbrush to the mirror and begins again. Sanha sees the runes reappear, then new symbols.

“Those are for union and separation,” Callah explains before Sanha can ask. “They’ll create a balanced medium for the mirror. The others will keep Oberon from crossing through the mirror.” Callah nods, almost to herself. “This is the last part of preparations. The longest part was the sigil on the floor. Once Jinwoo is ready, he can cast the spell.”

Sanha looks over the chalk that had been etched on the floor. The design takes up a third of the space. While the lines hadn’t made sense to Sanha when he helped draw them (based on the photo that Jinwoo had given him), he sees now how they spin around each other and create _something_. He isn’t quite sure what to call it. _Sigil_ is the word Callah uses, so Sanha nods to himself and calls it that.

Jinwoo sets the paint down on the small table and steps into the middle of the large sigil. He looks at Sanha and Callah. Sanha can see Callah nod from the corner of his eye. Jinwoo smiles a little before turning to face the mirror again and raising his hands.

When Sanha had heard the words _magic_ and _spells_ , he had expected some kind of spoken word. He watches as Jinwoo’s hands create patterns in the air. He draws a circle, his hands together at the top, apart, and together again at the bottom. Thin green lines of light vibrate where Jinwoo’s hands wave. Sanha thinks of the movie _Doctor Strange_ and the glowing orange shields and weapons that the sorcerers had been able to conjure. Is there a reason why this is so similar? Sanha wonders for a brief moment if there’s really a person known as the Sorcerer Supreme.

He tucks that question into his mental folder of unanswered questions and holds still as Jinwoo pushes the large circle, now with lines filling the middle, towards the mirror. Callah is holding her breath, too, and Sanha is suddenly very unsure if this is a good idea. He wants to trust Jinwoo with everything. The glowing lines move as if in slow motion as Jinwoo holds his stance.

The green lines shatter when they come in contact with the mirror. Sanha jumps slightly. Callah covers her mouth, silencing a giggle. Jinwoo is standing strong, and his voice booms through the otherwise empty room when he speaks.

“Oberon,” Jinwoo says strongly. “We need to talk.”

For a while, nothing happens. Jinwoo says nothing more, and he doesn’t move. Sanha watches the mirror in anticipation. Callah leans her head towards Sanha.

“There’s a mirror like this one in Faerie,” she says. “Oberon can hear the message from anywhere in Faerie. We have to wait now, since we don’t know where he might be. It could be a few minutes, it could be—”

“Jinwoo. Contacting me again so soon, are you?”

Sanha freezes. That voice sounds familiar. The mirror shimmers and the frame shakes. He thinks for a moment that it might fall off the wall all together. Instead, the foggy surface showing Jinwoo changes. Sanha gets a clear view of a tall, young man with black hair touching his shoulders and facial hair kept close to his skin. This is not the old, portly vision Sanha had seen when he first heard the name King Oberon.

“There’s an issue for us to discuss,” Jinwoo says. His voice leaves no room for questions. “You know of the boy who is Fairy Touched.”

“I do,” Oberon answers. “I know that you have been harboring him. He is an enemy of the Fae, and an outlaw who has broken the deal I signed with your kind almost twelve years ago. Why do you keep him from me?”

“He had no knowledge of any kind of deal between us. I wish to bargain on his behalf. Can we come to an agreement?”

Oberon tilts his head. Sanha thinks hair is going to fall into his face, but an invisible breeze swipes the hair behind his ear. His _pointed_ ear. Sanha gasps.

When Oberon’s head straights and his eyes look beyond Jinwoo, Sanha freezes. Callah’s hands move so quick that Sanha can’t tell what they do. “Don’t move,” Callah whispers.

Sanha stays still as Callah walks towards Jinwoo. She steps just into the chalk circle, and Oberon smiles.

“Callah, you’re here, too?”

“Don’t talk sweet to me, Oberon,” Callah bites. Sanha can’t believe that her voice sounds as brash as it does. “I am not here against Jinwoo, but with him. You’ve made a fool out of yourself again.”

Oberon’s expression falls. “Very well. What do you propose?”

Jinwoo is silent for a moment, and Oberon’s question rings through the room. “I can perform a spell that will pinpoint his memories of fairies and your world,” Jinwoo says. “He will forget them all.”

“And _you_ will be remembered,” Oberon says. “Memory by association is still memory. I will not accept this bargain.”

“We will not allow you to take another innocent boy to Faerie, Oberon,” Callah says. Her voice rings through the room in the silence that follows. Sanha is on edge as Oberon observes them.

“Get rid of them all.” Oberon crosses his arms. “Do away with each and every last one of his memories, and I will call off my fairies.”

“Not good enough,” Jinwoo says. “You need to promise to never bring any harm to him, myself, Callah, or any of the others who were involved. That includes any bystanders who might have seen your fairies in their hidden forms.”

 _Promise?_ Sanha wants to yell at Jinwoo. Promises can be broken. They need to get this in writing.

Oberon is quiet for a moment, obviously thinking. He sighs. “You have 24 hours. When those 24 hours are up, you must return to this mirror. You must do the spell in front of me, removing each and every one of his memories. Once the spell has been completed, I will call off my fairies. I promise that no harm will come to the boy, you or your accomplices, or Callah as long as you and I live.”

“You can’t agree to that!” Sanha yells, though he stays still like Callah told him. His voice doesn’t come out. He shouts, and there is no sound that reaches his ears. Though he opens and closes his mouth and screams, he makes no noise at all. Jinwoo and Callah stand still, and Oberon is staring at them. A minute passes before someone speaks.

“We accept your terms,” Jinwoo says. “We will return in 24 hours.” He waves his hands, green lines fly, and the mirror is a mirror again.

Sanha takes a step. “Jinwoo!” he yells, but his voice doesn’t come out.

Callah turns around, a sheepish smile on her lips. “Sorry, Sanha,” she says as she crosses the room to him. She waves her hands as he walks. “I had to put a vocal blocker on you. Another noise and Oberon would have known you were in the room.”

Sanha touches his throat once Callah drops her hands. Jinwoo is still standing across the room, and Sanha points at him. “You said you would keep me safe!” Sanha cries, walking towards the older man.

“Sanha, let me—”

“You said I wouldn’t give up my memories!” Sanha shouts. “You _promised_ that you would keep me s-afe!” His voice cracks, and he stops walking. “You promised,” he repeats.

Jinwoo nods. “I know. And I plan on keeping my promise. I need some time, first. There may be a way out of this, yet.”

Sanha shakes his head. “You agreed to what Oberon said.”

“What Oberon doesn’t know won’t hurt anybody,” Jinwoo answers, and Sanha’s brows furrow.

Callah puts her hand on Sanha’s arm, but he shakes her off. “What are you talking about?” Sanha asks, his voice demanding. “I’m tired of secrets.”

“We’ve been nothing but honest with you,” Jinwoo says. “Let me explain, and then let Callah show you something. Please, Sanha.”

Sanha swallows, his hands in fists by his sides. Jinwoo is right. They have been honest, at least since he held them at stick-point on that first night. He forces his shoulders back and relaxes his hands. Sanha can trust Jinwoo, so he will listen to what needs to be said.

******

Callah walks out of the room twenty minutes later, and Sanha follows her. He isn’t expecting Minhyuk to be there waiting in the hall. He is, though, and Sanha stops walking. Callah looks between them.

“I’ll come back for you in a moment,” Callah says, and she walks back into the room with Jinwoo.

Sanha smiles a little at Minhyuk, who smiles back. “Is everything okay?” Minhyuk asks. “You guys were in there for a while.”

“How long were you waiting out here?” Sanha asks. “You weren’t waiting for _me_ , were you?”

Minhyuk stammers, stumbling over his words for a moment before he speaks properly. “What? No, I was, uh, waiting on Jinwoo. I wanted to give him an update on how things were holding up with the fairies.”

“And how are they holding up?” Sanha crosses his arms over his chest as he looks at Minhyuk.

The pink tint on Minhyuk’s cheeks is enough to make Sanha giggle, but he listens to his answer anyway. Minhyuk ducks his head, and very quietly, he says, “They’re holding.”

Sanha giggles. “What’s the real reason you came over here?”

“I wanted to know how things went with talking to Oberon,” Minhyuk says. “Did you come to an agreement?”

The smile falls off Sanha’s face. “Kind of. It’s complicated. Jinwoo said he’ll explain everything to everybody later. He said it’ll be easier that way, so he can answer questions all at once and whatever else he needs to do.”

Minhyuk is looking at Sanha with worry, so Sanha smiles a little. “You’ll be fine,” Minhyuk says. “You know that right? I promised you, and I mean it.”

Sanha’s smile grows, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yeah, I know. I have to go do something with Callah now, so I’ll catch you later, okay?”

Minhyuk nods. He’s smiling, too, but Sanha can see worry behind his smile. Sanha pats Minhyuk’s shoulder then sticks his head into the room he had come out of, telling Callah that he’s ready.

******

Callah knows where she’s going, or at least it seems like she does. Sanha follows her downstairs and down the hall. She walks into a room, through a door, and unlocks a final door with a brass key. The space that she reveals is unlike any other part of the bunker that Sanha has seen before.

The floor is a light colored wood, a stark contrast to the wood everywhere else. Plaster is peeling off the walls, revealing red bricks. Aside from Callah, Sanha, and the lights set into the ceiling, the room is empty. Sanha steps in, turning in a circle. He can’t make sense of why there would be a room like this.

“This property used to belong to a powerful human magician,” Callah says, as if reading Sanha’s thoughts. “That magician was Jinwoo’s grandfather. He was human, but skilled with sorcery. He created this basement by expanding on the small basement that the house originally had. This room was used to give magic lessons to anybody who wanted them. Jinwoo didn’t know about this room until he inherited the place when his grandfather left it to him, along with a book of secrets that have been passed down for generations.”

Sanha glances at Callah, surprised that she knows so much about Jinwoo. She smiles. “I’m related to Jinwoo, going back generations. We come from central Europe, but families change. He’s my grandnephew, with quite a few _greats_ tacked onto the front.” Sanha thinks it over, then nods. He turns around in the room again, still stunned at the _cleanliness_ of the whole place. “But we aren’t down here to teach you magic, not yet. It’s your turn to experience magic.”

He stops turning and stares at Callah. “I’m going to what?”

“You can’t remember your first encounter with fairies,” Callah says. “Am I right?” Sanha nods. “You should be able to remember something like that. I know a spell that will let you relive a memory as if you are actually living it. We might be here for a while, so you should sit and get comfortable. Over here, against the wall.”

Callah gestures and Sanha follows her directioning. She steps fully into the room and shuts the door they had come through. Now seated on the floor, Sanha looks up at Callah. The smile on her face is comforting.

“Close your eyes,” she instructs, and Sanha does.

The darkness behind his eyelids is just dark for a while. He thinks he sees a spot of light in front of him. “Callah, is the spell supposed to make me see something?”

“Yes. That means it’s working. Walk towards the light in your head, focus on it. That will lead you to your memory.”

Sanha does as he is told, though he feels silly _walking in his head_ , as Callah had put it. The light grows. His eyes are still closed, right? His body feels warm. As the light fills his vision entirely, he feels like he’s falling backwards despite the wall behind him.

 _This is what magic feels like_ , Sanha thinks just before his memory becomes reality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a bunch more stories planned to take place in this world of fairies, magic, telekinetic boys and not-werewolves dating vampires. Leave a comment letting me know [which one of these titles](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/post/162442775216/wings-n-things-series-name) you think I should name the series!
> 
> I'm always available to chat [on my blog](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk!


	11. Ten Years Ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sanha is just eight years old, and this is the start of his future.

“Don’t let go of my hand, Sanha.”

That is what Sanha’s mom said five minutes ago. Their bus had arrived at the proper stop and his mom had tugged him off, carefully guiding him down the two steep steps. The park is still a little ways away. Sanha is trying not to walk faster than his mom, really. He can’t help it. Last week during their time at Namsan Park, his mom had bought him ice cream. Sanha is really hoping that the ice cream vendor will be there again.

As they walk, Sanha plays a game with himself. He counts ten steps and every ten steps, he takes a large step. His legs are longer than most boys his age. Though he doesn’t let go of his mom’s hand, the big steps put him in front of his mom and tug her hand forward. She sighs every time he does it, but Sanha isn’t told to stop so he doesn’t.

The park is much further than Sanha would have liked. His dad is at work on Tuesdays, like today, so Sanha and his mom always make this trip alone. Every Tuesday, they go to Namsan Park and have a picnic. Sanha takes a large step and looks back at his mom. A dragonfly zips by her head and she ducks, letting out a surprised cry. Sanha giggles, watching the dragonfly as it changes into a tiny person as it zooms away. He looks as it hovers in place. The way it flies is cool to Sanha. It zips towards him, to the left, and then zooms ahead toward the park.

“Mom, we have to follow it!” Sanha whines suddenly, tugging his mom’s hand. “You’re so _slow_. Come on, we have to follow it!”

“Sanha, behave,” his mom scolds, and Sanha quits tugging. He frowns and continues to walk normally, his hand swinging with his mom’s.

Sanha looks at the backpack his mom is carrying. There is food filling the bag, and Sanha can’t wait. There could be sandwiches, fruit, juice! He never knows what his mom packs for their picnics. Sanha kicks a rock as he walks until it skitters into the road. He sighs, hanging his head as he walks.

“Look, Sanha!”

As soon as his mom speaks, he picks up his head. He gasps, now able to see Namsan Tower peeking out over the trees. “Mom, the park is right _there_. Hurry! I have to see my friends!”

Sanha begins to run and instead of fighting him, his mom laughs and jogs along beside him. She probably will never understand Sanha’s love of Namsan Park or his obsession with the friendly bugs gathered around their small stone structures, but if it makes Sanha happy, she is willing to run for it.

It takes another ten minutes of walking before they find an open place to have their picnic. Sanha sits down, crossing his legs in front of him. His mom places a juice box down and Sanha immediately snatches it, his smile blindingly bright.

“I _love_ this one!” he shouts, wiggling in his seated position. His mom smiles and continues to unload items from the bag.

As a butterfly catches his eye, Sanha tunes his mom out. She’s saying something, he knows that, but he can’t be bothered. The shape of the bug warps, a tiny body replacing the insect’s torso and legs. Sanha watches as the tiny human almost lazily flies towards him, landing on his bare knee. The human is looking at the bandaid just below it, a quizzical look on her face.

“I fell last week,” Sanha says, gaining the attention of his mom. She quickly realizes that Sanha is, again, speaking to a bug, so she dismisses the conversation.

“I tripped on one of your little stone buildings,” Sanha continues, and the small woman nods. She gestures, making a show of lifting an imaginary rock and placing it down somewhere else then she points to Sanha.

“You want me to help rebuild it?” Sanha asks. She smiles, nodding, and points beyond Sanha. “It’s that way,” he says, his comment to himself. “Okay. Yeah, when I’m done eating with Mom, I’ll go rebuild your tower. It’s only fair that I rebuild it if I broke it.”

“Sanha,” his mom says, making him look away from the bug. “You are not going near those rocks again. That’s how you scraped your knee last week. I won’t allow you to hurt—”

“But my friends _need_ me to do it, Mom!” Sanha whines. The person nods, waving her hands. “Like this one. How is she supposed to get from one place to another if she doesn’t have the tower?”

Sanha’s mom looks frustrated for a moment before she looks at the butterfly that had landed on her son. Her face softens, a small smile replacing the frown. “This butterfly? What’s her name?”

Looking back to his friend, Sanha focuses. He squints, brows pulling together, and the little voice sounds like just noise for a moment even though he knows she is speaking. She flies up suddenly, making Sanha jolt, and she circles him for a minute. Sanha can’t see his head but he thinks his friend kissed him on his forehead. She lands on his leg again.

“My name is Highday,” Sanha hears, the voice high pitched and fragile. “And your name is Sanha.”

Sanha laughs. “Her name is Highday,” he tells his mom before looking at his friend again. “You have a weird name.”

Highday rolls her eyes, and Sanha likes how her orange hair matches her orange wings. “I will go now,” Highday says. “Come find the stones when you are ready!”

Sanha watches her take flight and disappear from view. He looks at his mom, who is just looking back at him. “I told you she was my friend,” he tells his mom.

Half an hour later, Sanha is licking his fingers clean of the sticky residue left by the fruit he had eaten. His mom is reading a book and drinking tea. Two more butterfly friends had visited him, and he had learned two more names. One was Crystalwing, with almost invisible wings, and the second had been named Emberleap, her wings a shimmering yellow with black circles. Sanha had laughed, trying to explain the conversation to his mom as he spoke with his friends.

“Are you done reading?” Sanha asks, leaning back on his hands. “I want to go play.”

His mom looks up from her book. “The rocks are just beside those trees, right?” she asks, and gestures with the book in the general direction.

Sanha nods. “Yes. They’re that way. Can I go, _please_? I’ll be safe, I will!”

She thinks for a moment and Sanha moves before she can tell him no. As he runs towards the tree line, his mom yells at him, but he just moves his long legs faster.

In the trees, Sanha can already see the little stone towers. Tiny humans wiz by him on multicolored wings, making Sanha laugh. He chases them, running further from the tree line. There are more towers made out of stacked rocks now, and he wonders how they balance like they do. He slows his running until he’s walking. The stones he knocked over last week were near a taller pile of stones.

“This way!”

Sanha turns, looking for the owner of the squeaky voice. There are a group of his winged friends hovering around toppled stones, and just beyond he can see the larger pile. Sanha walks over, avoiding stepping on a small gathering of bright yellow flowers, and kneels in the grass.

“This is the one, right?” he asks, and gets vigorous nods in response. He grabs the closest rock and stacks it, arranging them higher and higher until they stand up to almost a foot and a half.

“What’s that?” Sanha points to the larger stone pile. There’s a gap big enough for any of them to fly through, if they tuck their wings. 

“Do you want to see?”

Sanha looks at the top of the rocks he has just fixed, smiling at Highday. “Could I really? I mean, is that okay? I don’t want to do it if I’m not supposed to.”

“It’s okay,” Highday assures him. She gestures and Sanha stands, walking carefully to the large pile. When close enough, Highday speaks again.

“Kneel in front of it, and look inside. You might not see anything at first, but keep looking, and you will find what you seek.”

Sanha smiles. He likes the weird way that Highday speaks. Following her instructions, Sanha kneels with his knees almost touching the base of the stones. They form a short pillar, the opening about two feet from the bottom though another foot of stones extends upwards. Sanha keeps his hands to himself when he leans close. If he pushes on the pillar of rocks at all, it would probably topple over. It would take him at least an hour to rebuild it.

Highday was right. Sanha can’t see anything except for darkness inside the hole. It’s like when he woke up in the middle of the night and the plug for his night lamp had fallen out of the socket. (His dad had fixed it the next day because Sanha can’t sleep without his lamp and his blanket.) Sanha squints. He thinks he sees a little bit of light within and he leans closer, the edges of the stones pressing into his cheeks. The little lean must be what he needs to see the secret hiding in between the rocks.

Blinding white light fills Sanha’s vision first, replaced quickly by a soft pink. He blinks, the color lifting and spreading until he sees a large expanse of land. The green of the trees seems to vibrate with intensity, and the sky is so blue that he thinks it might be purple. Sanha gasps quietly when he sees a tiny person fly by in his field of vision, but he doesn’t pull his head away from the opening. A large, castle-like building stands in the farthest point of where Sanha can see. It’s almost entirely hidden by dense fog, but he can see a basic shape, and above the fog stretches spires that Sanha imagines are taller than any building in Seoul. A thin river of silver cuts through the open fields and forest.

“It’s _amazing_ ,” Sanha breathes. “Is this where you live?”

“It is,” he hears Highday say, though he can’t see her. “We are fairies. This is our home, Faerie, where every place looks like what you see now.”

“Fairies live in Fairy?” Sanha asks, questioning what he had heard.

“ _Fae-rie_ ,” Highday repeats, her voice clearer. “Do not forget it. Repeat it after me. Fairies live in the world of _Fae-rie_.”

“Fairies live in the world of _Fae-rie_ ,” Sanha repeats. He observes the scene before him, watching wispy clouds shift in the near-purple sky.

“ _Leave this place, and do not return. You do not belong here._ ”

Sanha leans back suddenly at the strong voice that he had heard. In his rush to scramble backwards, his legs kick out to propel him, colliding with the base of the pillar of rocks. Time seems to slow down as he watches the rocks tumble, scattering across the grass.

“Oh, _no_ ,” Sanha gasps. “I didn’t mean to do that, I’m so sorry.” He moves fast, gathering stones and pushing them back into place quickly. “I’ll fix it, I promise.”

“Sanha!” His mom is calling him.

“Just a minute, Mom!” he yells back, hurriedly pressing rocks into place. He bumps them and they topple again. “No, no, _no_ ,” he murmurs. “Highday, I’m so sorr—”

Highday is staring at him, as are the rest of the fairies who have gathered around. He watches as Highday nods, slowly. “You are safe,” she says, “but for how long? You must go. Oberon cannot find you here.”

“Who’s Oberon?” Sanha asks, but fairies are already pushing at his arms and pulling his clothes.

“Go,” Highday says, her voice firm. She makes a gesture, and Sanha is hit with a burst of air. “Run. Forget us, and when the time comes, we will be there for you. Call, and we will come.”

Sanha hurries to his feet, and despite wanting to help rebuild their tower, the urgency in Highday’s tone is enough to make him run. He skids across patches of dirt and cracks every branch he steps on. His foot catches on a tower of rocks that he overlooked and he takes it down with him as he stumbles. Highday’s words are fading. What had she said? Call, and they’ll come? Call them from where, come for what? Why is he running?

Sanha breaks through the tree line, smacking into his mom. “Mom!” he says. As soon as he looks up at her, a smile breaks out on his face. “My friends had to leave, but _Mom_ , their wings are so cool! Do you know how fast a dragonfly can fly?”

His mom shakes his head. “I don’t know. We can look it up when we get home. Does that sound okay? Come on, Sanha, we have to go.”

Sanha takes hold of his mom’s hand and walks beside her. The backpack is already packed, and he counts his steps. Every ten steps he takes a bigger step, putting himself in front of his mom and further from the world of fairies that he has already forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I hope you have been enjoying the fic~ If you have, I want your opinion on a name for the series! I have roughly 6 ideas for other fics (a mix of prequels and sequels), but I can't decide what to name the series. Take a look [at this post](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/post/162442775216/wings-n-things-series-name) to help me decide! You can leave a comment on this chapter with your vote. I am also always available at [my blog](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/) if you want to chat!


	12. Clari-fairy-cation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are the things that need to be clarified.

Sanha blinks, tilting his head from one side to the other to stretch his neck. His mouth feels dry, and there’s a weird taste on his tongue. Callah is sitting on the floor diagonally to him, and she smiles a little when she sees his eyes are open. Sanha takes a minute, stretching out his limbs. It feels like he took a nap and hasn’t moved in hours.

“Does magic always make your mouth taste funny?” Sanha asks, then he licks his lips. “Did you feed me something to make my mouth taste metallic-y?” He frowns, sticking out his tongue and casting his eyes downward as if trying to see it.

Callah laughs lightly. “Fairy magic _does_ tend to leave an aftertaste, though this is the first time I’ve been told it tastes metallic.”

“Well, it’s gross,” Sanha says, but his tongue is still sticking out so it warps the way his words sound. He puts his tongue back in his mouth and leans his head back against the wall. There’s a moment of silence before he speaks. “So I knocked over a pile of rocks, fixed it, and then—Highday!” Sanha picks up his head. “I met her earlier!”

Callah nods. “I thought she might be drawn to you again. Was there anything else that happened?”

“I broke the fairy mound in Namsan Park,” Sanha says, sighing. “Highday showed me Faerie, and then I heard a voice, and—”

“You heard a _voice_?” Callah asks, sounding surprised. “Was it male?”

“Um, I think so,” Sanha says, though his thoughts have already moved. “Wait, I think Oberon talked to me. He said something like ‘leave and never return,’ something like that. When I heard Oberon talking earlier, his voice sounded familiar.”

Callah shakes her head. “Oberon would not have spoken to you and warned you to leave. That was likely Marwig, who tends to be much more lenient. It’s why he wasn’t crowned the king when their father died.”

“What if Marwig could protect me?” Sanha asks suddenly, sitting up straighter. “Couldn’t Marwig protect me from Oberon?”

“You do not want to make a deal with Marwig,” Callah warns. “You would only anger Oberon further, and quite possibly strike the start of a war in Faerie. That would result in you being treated more harshly, not less, possibly by both Oberon and Marwig.”

Sanha slumps against the wall. “I can’t believe I’m really going to lose my memories,” Sanha says quietly. “What will my parents think? What am I going to do about school?” He makes a face, the corners of his mouth pushing into his cheeks. “Do you think my parents will start a fuss over it and make the police do an investigation to find out where I was? They could track it to Minhyuk and the others, couldn’t they?”

Callah is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know what the future holds for you,” she says, and it seems like she is choosing her words carefully. “All that I know is that Jinwoo and the others will continue to do what is best for you. It’s quite obvious they care for you, especially Jinwoo and Minhyuk, though not in the same way.”

Sanha feels heat rise to his cheeks and he covers them with his hands, a pout settling on his lips. “It’s not like that,” he murmurs as if complaining to a teasing mother. “I don’t even like boys, not like that.” _But Minhyuk_ is _cute_ , he thinks. Sanha gets to his feet quickly.

“We should go find Jinwoo,” Sanha rushes to say. “The others probably want to know what’s going to happen. We shouldn’t keep them waiting, but, um, I don’t know the way, so…”

Callah laughs as she stands up. “Right, of course. This way,” she says, heading for the door.

******

It’s early evening by the time that Sanha and Callah arrive back in the main room of the underground bunker. From the time of their reappearance, it takes roughly fifteen minutes to get everybody to sit down together on the three mismatched couches. Sanha spends that time checking on his guitar and _very_ carefully moving the gun that had been placed on one of the couches. Jinwoo is sitting at the middle of the green couch, pressed against the wall, with Dongmin beside him. Sanha has taken a seat in what he decides is his favorite spot, the corner of the couch with wooden arms that is closer to the green couch. Minhyuk is beside him, and across from them sit Bin, Myungjun, and Callah.

After a long silence has settled in the air, Jinwoo speaks. “We got in touch with Oberon,” he tells them. “I had contacted him three days ago, before the fairies attacked Sanha the first time. He wasn’t happy to have me calling him again so soon.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a di—”

Myungjun elbows Bin before he can finish his statement. “Go on,” he says with a bright smile directed at Jinwoo. Sanha is still surprised that Bin’s glare doesn’t cut people in half.

“I talked to him, and Callah can vouch for me, but Oberon wouldn’t budge.” Sanha swallows and he gets a concerned look from Dongmin. The advanced hearing lycans have is kind of unsettling when Sanha thinks about it.

Jinwoo looks at each of them in turn, but he stares at the coffee table when he speaks again. “Our only option to keep Sanha out of going to Faerie is to erase all of his memories.”

Minhyuk is the first to speak. “ _All_?” he questions, seeking clarification. “Jinwoo, we can’t do that. I won’t _let_ you do that.”

Sanha looks at Minhyuk, who seems ready to jump on top of Jinwoo and start landing punches. Dongmin speaks before he can. “That was all that Oberon would accept?”

Jinwoo nods, a bleak look on his face. “I tried bargaining. I suggested wiping the memories of fairies only. Oberon said that Sanha would remember us, and memory by association is still memory.”

“If you wiped the memories of fairies, then he would be just a regular human again, wouldn’t he?” Bin sits forward as he asks his question. “I mean, if he doesn’t remember becoming Fairy Touched and he doesn’t remember seeing fairies or talking to fairies, he would just be a regular human, right?”

“In theory, yes,” Callah answers, and all six sets of eyes travel to her. “That could work, but the deal has been made. Erasing only certain memories and leaving the rest untouched would be risky. Oberon is likely to ask Sanha questions about himself that he knows the answer to, and it is very hard to lie to a fairy.”

“Couldn’t you just do a spell that makes it easy to lie to a fairy?” Minhyuk asks, and his voice sounds strained. “That would solve it, right?”

“The only person here who knows fairy magic is Callah,” Jinwoo says. “And I said that I would be the one to do the spell on Sanha. Oberon would end the deal if he saw Callah doing magic.”

“What if she stands outside the circle that Oberon can see in?” Sanha asks. “Earlier, Callah had to step into the chalk circle to be seen by Oberon.”

“Oberon won’t allow any trickery of the room,” Callah says. “He’ll likely make us use the entire room, and just because it looks like he has a small field of vision, that mirror actually shows him a full view of the room as if he were standing there in person.”

“We can’t do this,” Minhyuk says, but his voice is quiet. “This is so stupid.” He looks up, looking around at the others who aren’t Sanha. His voice is louder when he talks next. “Aren’t you _upset_? Can’t we think of something, anything, to fix this? Every time something goes wrong, we just whisk away people’s memories and pretend that nothing happened. I won’t do that again.”

“I’m afraid that changing the plan is out of the question,” Jinwoo says. “We have no second options here. I wish we did, but—”

“You’re just saying that,” Minhyuk says. “You’re giving up, all of you.”

“What about the promise?”

All eyes turn to Sanha. He continues to speak. “Jinwoo made Oberon promise something when they were negotiating. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but I know there was something about a promise.”

“I made Oberon promise to bring no harm to Sanha, us, Callah, or any innocent bystanders that were involved in this,” Jinwoo fills in. “He’ll hold to that promise for as long as he and the rest of us are alive.”

“And fairies can’t break promises,” Dongmin says. “Jinwoo, that’s a genius move.”

“That still doesn’t solve the issue of Sanha having to lose all his memories,” Minhyuk complains, clearly agitated. “You’re all just going to sit here and let this happen? I’m not. I’m going to find a way around taking away all of—”

“Hey.”

Minhyuk looks at Sanha, and Sanha smiles. The smile doesn’t quite reach Sanha’s eyes, but it’s there. “It’s okay,” he says, his words directed only at Minhyuk. “Really, it is.”

“Sanha, we can’t just—”

“Minhyuk,” Sanha says, lowering his eyes. “Please. Let things be.” He has to say it. This has to happen. He knows it hurts, and it’s going to be weird recovering from it, but he _has_ to go through with the deal that Jinwoo agreed to.

Minhyuk is quiet. They all are, at least until Sanha speaks again.

“Since I’m going to be forgetting everything,” Sanha says, and Dongmin gives him a sad smile, “I want to ask some questions. They keep piling up. There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I figure if I have to forget everything, I might as well learn as much as I can now. What do they call it? Is there a word for that?”

Dongmin chuckles at Sanha’s floundering, and the sound is so natural coming from the young man that Sanha can’t help but smile. He sits up a little. “Myungjun,” he says first. “Where do tritons come from? Minhyuk said they’re—uh, _you’re_ rare.”

Myungjun smiles and relaxes into the couch. “We are, though I don’t know if you can count me as a triton anymore. You can take a fish out of water, but you can’t take the water out of the fish.” There’s a silence after his comment. “Or something like that.”

“The origin of tritons, Myungjun,” Jinwoo says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Myungjun gives Jinwoo a sour look. When he turns to Sanha, he’s beaming again. “Tritons, like myself, are actually from _Triton_ , the Greek god. It’s not common knowledge or anything you’ll find on the internet, but Triton was killed by Zeus, his uncle, because Triton’s father, Poseidon, killed one of Zeus’ children. He had so many, though, so I forget who Poseidon killed. How could Zeus have that many children? There were, like, twenty of them. And let me tell you, _none_ of them were nice.”

Jinwoo clears his throat, and Myungjun redirects himself. “Anyway, Triton died and his body was tossed into the ocean. His body split into a bunch of tiny fragments, and now here we are. It’s hard to tell how many of us there were at the time. When Jinwoo found me, I was the only triton in a lake full of a couple dozen naiads. The land trapped us in and I stayed there for—oh, wow, I don’t really know how long. Too long. I can barely remember any of my time being a triton, though. Now it’s kind of a blur.”

“Wait,” Sanha says. “You knew the Greek gods? You said none of them were nice.”

“They were _annoying_ ,” Myungjun says. “Poseidon was pretty cool, seeing as we were kind of each a piece of his son, then Atlas became the chosen child and we were forgotten. Zeus was really uptight, and he just _loved_ to strike people down. His kids were worse than he was. And Aphrodite couldn’t even hold a torch to Athena. It was like comparing a weed to a flower. Don’t _even_ get me started on Ares. God of war? More like god of complaining when he didn’t get his way. Once, he—”

“Myungjun.”

He tears his eyes away from Sanha and looks at Jinwoo. It takes a moment, but he smiles, shrugging a little. “Sorry, I get carried away easily.”

“Yeah, now you realize,” Bin says, mostly under his breath, but Myungjun still hears him and gives him a slap against his leg.

“What about Oberon and Marwig?” Sanha asks. “What are they? They’re not fairies, are they?”

“There used to be a very prominent race of fairies called High Fae,” Dongmin answers. Sanha should’ve known that the glasses-wearing lycan would have the answers. “The High Fae abandoned Faerie, all except for Oberon and Marwig’s grandfather and grandmother. Their grandfather was too old to become king once the current king died, so his son, Vyggos, became king, and now Oberon is king.”

“This was all thousands of years ago,” Jinwoo adds. “Oberon became king around 300 years ago, and his first order of business was protecting Callah.”

“Why?” Sanha asks, looking at Callah. “Oberon likes you, doesn’t he?”

Callah sighs, leaning her chin into her hand. “Unfortunately. My mother was born from one of these High Fae and her human. My mother was half fairy, then, and she married a human man. When my mother had me, word spread across Faerie. I was teased and picked on by fairies, and then Oberon became king. The rest you need to know, you already do.”

“And you’re related to Jinwoo,” Sanha says. He looks at Jinwoo, who nods.

“She’s my great-aunt. Her brother is the man who led my family to where we are now.”

“So that makes you, like, part fairy, doesn’t it?” Sanha smiles, leaning towards Jinwoo. “You’re a fairy.”

Bin snorts, his amusement showing, and Sanha can see Jinwoo mouth a curse in his direction. “Not technically,” Jinwoo says, looking at Sanha again. “That man, Beckett, shared a father with Callah, but not their mother. Callah’s mother only had Callah, then she passed away.”

“Oh,” Sanha says, bowing his head with a look at Callah. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”

Callah waves her hand. “It’s nothing to worry over. It was a very, very long time ago.”

Sanha nods, and silence falls. He can’t find another question pressing enough to ask. None of it will matter in less than 24 hours anyway. How much time does he have? He guesses it’s close to 22 hours now. Finally, a very important question finds it’s way to his train of thought.

“What’s going to happen after the spell?”

Before, Sanha never understood the phrase _deafening silence_ , but now he does. He thinks for a moment that he hasn’t spoken, until Jinwoo meets his eyes.

“I’ll take you home,” Jinwoo says. “I’ll probably need to explain that you’re going home. For your own safety, I’ll take the memory of myself out of your head before I leave you at your house. It’ll be better that way. Easier.”

“Easier,” Minhyuk says, and it sounds like the punchline to a bad joke. “For him, yeah, but that’s not a fix for the rest of us.”

“We will live with it,” Jinwoo says, “because we have to, for Sanha’s safety.”

Sanha sits in the quiet that follows Jinwoo’s statement, the words ringing in his ears. He hopes that they won’t miss him. He wants this to be easy for them, too, because the thought of them suffering with their memories is too hard to imagine. Minhyuk stands up and leaves the room without saying anything. As they watch him walk away, Bin sighs.

“He’s okay,” Bin says, his words directed at nobody in particular. “He’ll probably go punch the bag in the training room. Give him some time to cool down.”

“We should probably clean up some of this iron powder, too,” Dongmin says. “We won’t need it anymore after tomorrow afternoon.”

Sanha doesn’t move, though the rest of them do. He stares at the table as they clean it off, but he doesn’t say anything. They talk, and he thinks he might hear laughter eventually. A plate of food is set in front of him and he picks at it, not really hungry. Eventually there’s a tan hand in front of his face and he looks up, finding Minhyuk as the hand’s owner. Glancing between Minhyuk’s hand and his face, Sanha realizes that he’s not moving his hand away. Nerves shaking in every inch of his body, he slides his hand into Minhyuk’s and lets himself be pulled across the weathered floor and down the hallway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have been keeping up with this fic, then you should know that I plan to write a series of prequels and sequels! Since I'm not sure what to name this series, though, I need your help. Take a look at [this post on my blog](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/post/162442775216/wings-n-things-series-name), then leave a comment here telling me which title best suits this series! If you just want to chat, I'm always available on [my blog](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/).


	13. Last Thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all getting to be a little too much.

Sanha watches their feet as they walk. He takes steps slightly larger than Minhyuk, but he is walking a little behind him, so they move at the same time. Measuring his steps, he matches pace with Minhyuk. The other must feel the shift, because he glances down at their feet, too. Sanha glimpses a smile on Minhyuk’s lips. His hand is squeezed, gently, and the feeling transfers to his heart. Minhyuk is holding his hand, walking beside him, and Sanha keeps thinking about how he isn’t going to remember any of this while Minhyuk will carry the memory alone.

“I’m scared,” Sanha whispers, and Minhyuk stops walking. Sanha anticipates it this time, though, and he’s stopped before Minhyuk has.

“You don’t have to be,” Minhyuk says, his voice quiet. His free hand lifts up a few inches before returning to his side. Sanha almost wants to make a ridiculous request and ask that Minhyuk just _hold_ him until it’s time.

“Even though you’ll forget this,” Minhyuk continues, and Sanha bites his bottom lip, “that doesn’t mean it has to be the end. I mean, I can just run into you one day. We could plan it, even, and you wouldn’t know, but I would, and then we could be friends, and I can introduce you to the others again, and we could—”

“Minhyuk, is that you? Do you have Sanha with you?”

Sanha looks up from Minhyuk’s face to see the open door down the hall. He isn’t quite sure how far they walked, since he wasn’t paying attention to the turns they took, but Jinwoo’s voice calls from in the room. It isn’t hard for Sanha to guess that Jinwoo sent Minhyuk to get him.

“We’ll talk later,” Minhyuk says to Sanha. “You should get to Jinwoo and do whatever he wants you to. He didn’t tell me anything.”

Sanha nods and pulls his hand out of Minhyuk’s warm one, reluctantly. Maybe he imagines it, but Minhyuk’s hand seems to chase his own for just a minute, prolonging their contact. Sanha blushes, of course, and he turns to quickly walk into the room with Jinwoo, shutting the door behind himself.

******

Jinwoo follows Sanha out of the room right away. He sighs, patting Sanha on the back lightly. “You’ll be okay, kid,” he says. “Go down the hall, hang a left, and another left, and that’ll get you back to your room. If not, just yell Minhyuk’s name. He’s probably sulking in the area somewhere.”

Sanha smiles a little and nods, watching as Jinwoo leaves in the opposite direction. Sanha walks, turning left at the first split in the hall, and then left again. Jinwoo was right, and Sanha is able to find his way to his temporary room again. He lets himself in, since the door is already cracked open, and sees Minhyuk lying across his bed in the wrong direction. His feet are dangling off one end, barely, and his shoulders and head extend past the other side. Sanha smiles, covering his mouth to hide any laughter. For a moment, he just looks Minhyuk over. Even from the back, he’s—

“Sanha!”

Startled, Sanha trips over his own feet and stumbles into the room. He uses the door knob to balance himself, but Minhyuk has already been alerted of his presence. Sanha smiles sheepishly, and then Myungjun is standing in the doorway.

“Sanha, where did Jinwoo go? What were you two doing? You must have been in that room for two hours.”

Sanha shrugs. “He didn’t say where he was going, he just kind of gave me directions then wandered off. He had some papers with him, though.”

“You should try the file room by the library,” Minhyuk says. “If he had papers, he might’ve been trying to go sort them.”

Myungjun nods. “Good idea. I’ll leave, then. Go back to what you were doing, sulking or whatever.”

Minhyuk sighs as Myungjun walks off. “Why does everybody think I’m sulking?” he asks himself.

Sanha crosses the room to his tiny bed. He sits there, hands smoothing out any wrinkles in the blanket. The room is quiet. Minhyuk has changed to lying on his back, his phone held above his face. Sanha’s own phone sits forgotten on the crate serving as his night stand. It’s still plugged in from the previous night, so it must be charged. He disconnects it and gets comfortable. The pillow under his head is cold as he taps on the screen.

Sanha avoids reading the text from his mom at first. It’s late, and she probably wants to know how he is, but he can’t bring himself to read it. If he reads the message from his mom, he’ll probably end up crying. Sanha hates crying. He avoids anything and everything that might make him cry. His nose gets all stuffy and he can’t breathe, and yet he’s opening the message anyway, biting his tongue as he does.

_Hi, sweetheart. It’s late and I haven’t heard from you. How is your weekend going? Your father and I went to Dongdaemun today. We have a surprise for when you get home. Let me know how you are. Love you!_

There is a second text that’s just an explosion of random emojis, and Sanha bites back his tears, letting out a pathetic noise.

“Sanha?”

Setting his phone aside, Sanha covers his face with his hands. He hears Minhyuk shuffling around, but he doesn’t say anything. As a weight presses on the bed, he doesn’t move his hands away from his face. Tears are sliding past his fingers, but Sanha hates crying.

“My mom,” he manages to say, his voice shaking. “She doesn’t know. I’m going to go home tomorrow, and I won’t be the person she raised. I’ll be a stranger.”

The weight of it comes crashing onto Sanha all at once. He pulls his hands away from his face and sits up quickly, moving before he can think. His arms wrap around Minhyuk, who is already sitting too close and yet not close enough. The other boy doesn’t say a word as Sanha buries his face in his shoulder.

 _This is gross_ , Sanha thinks as his face shifts and he feels the wet fabric under his face. Minhyuk is silent, though, one arm around Sanha’s waist. His hand is rhythmically patting Sanha’s back, and even though Sanha cries, he is comforted by the gentle touch. He isn’t sure how long they stay like that, but it’s long enough for Sanha’s arms to feel uncomfortable. He pulls back, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hands.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Your shirt is all dirty now.”

“The shirt doesn’t matter,” Minhyuk says, his voice quiet. “Are you going to text your mom back? You should, probably. It might make you feel better. And I’m here if you need to cry again.”

Sanha chokes out a laugh, wiping his nose. “I’m really sorry. You should probably change shirts, or something.” Sanha grabs his phone and lies on his side, facing the wall. “I won’t peek, I promise.”

Minhyuk laughs a little and rises from the bed, though his hand pats Sanha’s calf before he walks away. Sanha rereads the message from his mom. A quiet sigh escapes him. Though he promised, Sanha can’t help himself. He twists on the bed, thankful that the mattress doesn’t squeak under his weight. Minhyuk’s back faces him and Sanha only glances for a second, but he’s sort of glad he did. Facing the wall again, ignoring his warm ears and cheeks, Sanha types a reply to his mom full of heart emojis (sometimes as many as five in a row). Tapping send, Sanha turns on the bed, facing the open room again as he sets his phone on the night stand.

Minhyuk is sitting on the edge of his bed, his previously green shirt now replaced by a white one of the same style. His cheeks look flushed to Sanha. “Is everything okay?” Sanha asks.

“I have a mirror on top of my dresser, Sanha,” Minhyuk says, gesturing to the dresser and the mirror propped against the wall on top of it.

Sanha, despite the blubbering mess he had been moments before, squeaks in embarrassment. His hands cover his face again, this time out of anxiety rather than sadness. There’s the sound of shifting, and when something heavy and soft lands on his legs, he shrieks.

“Minhyuk!” Sanha cries, glancing down at the pillow he had been hit with. He lifts it, chucking it in the direction of Minhyuk, only making it half the distance.

Across the room, Minhyuk is already ready with another pillow, this one small and circular. Where did he get that pillow from? Sanha yells as it goes flying without Minhyuk actually throwing it, and he laughs, dodging it by colliding with the floor. He doesn’t have time to react before Minhyuk’s cheating, using his telekinesis to make another pillow fling in his direction.

“Cheater!” Sanha cries. He crawls across the floor, scrambling for the discarded pillows and launching them at Minhyuk while the other easily deflects them (though he lets some hit him, for fairness, of course).

When the pillows stop flying twenty minutes later, they’re both out of breath. Sanha collapses on the larger bed beside Minhyuk, his chest rising and falling deeply. Pillows are scattered across the wood floor, each one a different size and shape from the other. He hasn’t gotten out more than a few accusatory words or incoherent yells since the first pillow flew, but the silence is nice. The quiet extends once they’ve caught their breath, and Sanha can’t believe it. Minhyuk _snores_.

The younger laughs. He pokes a finger into Minhyuk’s ribs, making him groan. “What?” he whines, opening his eyes just barely. Minhyuk pauses. “Was I snoring already?”

Sanha smiles and nods. “You should clean up before you go to sleep,” Sanha says. “You did a lot of stuff outside earlier, and honestly, you smelled kind of gross earlier when you hugged me.”

“When _I_ hugged _you_?” Minhyuk says, sitting up. “You hugged me! You were the one crying!”

“Was not!” Sanha yells. He lunges off the bed, reaching for the first pillow his hands can find and he launches it at Minhyuk quickly.

Minhyuk catches the pillow, laughing. “Okay, Sanha, _I_ hugged _you_ , but you were the one crying. You ruined my clean shirt.”

Sanha smiles a little, though it starts slow and then quickly grows into a full grin. “You still smelled, though.”

“You!” Minhyuk cries, leaping off the bed.

Thirty minutes later, when Sanha had changed his clothes into more comfortable ones and removed his contacts, and Minhyuk had taken a shower and blow dried his hair, they lean back against Minhyuk’s headboard comfortably. Neither of them had really spoken when Sanha made himself comfortable beside Minhyuk. There were no words exchanged as Sanha slid his fingers between Minhyuk’s. Though they don’t look at each other or speak, Sanha knows that this is all okay.

“I’m sorry,” Minhyuk says softly. The words come out in a way that immediately makes Sanha want to hug the other boy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise.”

“Minhyuk, you don’t have to—”

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t keep my promise,” Minhyuk repeats. “I said I wouldn’t let anything bad happen, and that it would all be okay. This isn’t as bad as them taking you to Faerie, but it’s still bad, and I promised.”

“It’s okay,” Sanha says, his voice small. He senses more than sees Minhyuk look at him, so he twists his head sideways. There’s no more than ten inches between their noses. The closeness and the intensity of Minhyuk’s gaze makes Sanha’s cheeks warm, but he doesn’t look away.

“Maybe, hopefully,” Minhyuk says, “we can meet again. I don’t know if Jinwoo will let me, but I really want to run into you and be your friend again.”

 _Friend_ , Sanha thinks, and he unconsciously runs his thumb over Minhyuk’s. The motion is almost too normal.

“If—no, _when_ ,” Minhyuk says, “when we meet again, I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make up breaking my promise.”

“Minhyuk, don’t—”

“I’m really glad that those stupid fairies chased you and you ran into Jinwoo’s van.”

Sanha laughs, shortly, glancing away from Minhyuk just to look back at him again. “I am, too,” he says, his voice quiet.

Neither of them say anything, and Minhyuk is the first to look away. He coughs and sits up a little. “You should probably go to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be confusing for you, and it’s best if you get some—”

“Can I sleep here?”

The words pour out of Sanha before he can stop them, and his blush is back again. “Not like that,” he says quickly, looking away from Minhyuk. “I just, um, that bed is really small and my feet always hang off the end because I’m really tall. It’s uncomfortable. But, um, it’s totally okay if you don’t want me to. Actually, I probably should just, um, go over there and.. Sleep…”

“Get under the covers,” Minhyuk is saying as he tugs back the blankets underneath Sanha’s body. “I can sleep on top of the blanket. I have another one anyway.” He squats and comes back up with another blanket in hand. “Jinwoo makes us all keep an extra.”

Sanha is thankful again for Minhyuk as he climbs under the blankets. They get fixed over his body as he lies on his side, and he hates that he won’t remember any of this kindness. Minhyuk settles on top of the blankets and covers himself with the thick throw blanket.

After a moment of looking at each other, Sanha untucks his arm. Minhyuk’s hand is already there to meet his. He slides their fingers together. Sanha closes his eyes and breathes, focusing on the feeling of Minhyuk’s hand and committing it to a memory that he won’t be able to save. Eventually, he drifts off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you like this story and would like to help me name the series it will belong to, you can take a look at [this post](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/post/162442775216/wings-n-things-series-name) and leave a comment to let me know what you think it should be called!
> 
> I'm always available to chat on my blog [here](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/) so don't be a stranger! I love talking to people, honestly. Send me a message!


	14. Not the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end is never actually the end.

The voice that comes to him through his sleep is kind. Sanha tucks his arms into his chest and rolls onto his front, burying his face into the pillow with a groan. His mom can’t even let him sleep late on the weekends, can she?

“Sanha, you need to get up.”

That voice does not belong to his mom.

“We let you sleep as late as we thought we could, but it’s time to get up.”

Sanha pushes his body up, supporting himself on his elbows. He looks over at Dongmin, who’s smiling a little. “What time is it?” Sanha asks, his words mumbled and pushed together by his sleepiness.

“A little after 10,” Dongmin says, patting Sanha’s leg. “I’ll let you get changed in peace, but don’t go back to sleep. I’ve already tried to wake you up once, and next time I’ll send Bin in here.”

Sanha sits up further. “I’m up, I’m up. You don’t need to get Bin.”

Dongmin smirks and straightens. “We’re having breakfast soon, so hurry up.”

Sanha stays where he is until Dongmin shuts the bedroom door. He tosses off the blanket and stretches, arms reaching over his head and then towards his toes. His shoulder pops uncomfortably and he lets out a noise. Sanha quickly picks out a pair of jeans from his backpack, though when he puts them on he has to roll them up several times. The shirt he was wearing to sleep in gets tossed into the backpack with the rest of his dirty clothes once he puts on his last clean shirt. Is it too fitting that he’s wearing his favorite shirt on the last day he’ll remember that it’s his favorite? Sanha looks down at the giraffe embroidered on the pocket of the shirt then leaves the room.

He was finally starting to be able to navigate on his own. Sanha drags his hand across the brick wall as he walks, slower than necessary. He can smell food even this far away from the kitchen. There’s a sudden shout from Myungjun, probably in the kitchen, probably being hit by Jinwoo, and Sanha has to stop walking for a moment. He isn’t going to remember any of this in a few hours.

By the time Sanha makes it to the kitchen and dining combo room, everybody but Minhyuk is seated. Sanha sits in the closest chair and rubs his eyes under his glasses. He’s been awake for a little while but he’s still groggy.

Food has been laid out on the table, but nobody is eating just yet. Sanha squints as he looks at them, and they’re all looking at him in return. “What?” Sanha asks.

“You’re wearing glasses,” Jinwoo says. “It’s.. different.”

“Good different or bad different?” Sanha responds. He glances across the room at Minhyuk, who is standing over the stove in the middle of flipping a pancake. “Minhyuk, you cook?”

“Yup,” Minhyuk says, not looking away from the pancake until he’s satisfied with how it’s landed in the pan. When he looks at Sanha, it’s with a gentle smile. Sanha averts his eyes almost immediately due to his embarrassment from having spent the night in the same bed as the other.

Sanha guesses it’s pretty hard to hide his embarrassment. Myungjun’s leg connects with his under the long table, making Sanha jump. When he looks up, Myungjun winks at him. Sanha swallows, the heat in his cheeks unmistakeable. Dongmin whispers something to Myungjun, and Bin and Jinwoo are talking softly. Sanha stares at the wood grain in the table, tracing the patterns with his eyes. Minhyuk’s voice is what interrupts him.

“You can eat, Sanha.”

He looks to his side where Minhyuk sits, smiling. Minhyuk gestures at the table, and the others are all eating already. It seems Sanha has gotten exceptionally good at zoning out over the last day. How much time does he have left? It can’t be more than a few hours. Yesterday when Minhyuk had taken him above ground to see the fairies arriving, it had been just about two in the afternoon.

Sanha forces himself to add a pancake to the empty plate in front of himself. He isn’t really hungry until he’s smothering the breakfast food in dark syrup. They’re all quiet, mostly, as they eat. The air hanging over them is heavy. Sanha can’t find words that would be okay to say. Should he comfort them? Tell them that he’s okay with doing this, even though he isn’t? Sanha really just wants to go to sleep until it’s time. Would they let him? A single thought is swirling in Sanha’s brain, knocking away any other thing in his head.

_Is this what dying is like?_

He can’t say for certain. Sanha has never even been to a funeral, though he has watched dramas and movies where people die. Movies and dramas aren’t real life, though. Sanha thinks he might be a little better off than most people. Unlike most people who are about to die, Sanha knows what’s coming, and he technically isn’t dying. His personality might be different when he starts to make new memories, he thinks. People _are_ their memories, aren’t they? Even if he meets Minhyuk again, would he even like New Sanha?

“Do you want to help me do the dishes?”

Sanha blinks, pulled out of his thoughts for the second time by Minhyuk’s voice. The kitchen and dining combo room is empty aside from them. The stack of dirty dishes Minhyuk is holding looks foreboding. Sanha nods anyway.

They spend the next fifteen minutes quietly, the only sound being running water or the dishes knocking against one another. Sanha mostly stands and watches Minhyuk as he gets bubbles up to his elbows. Minhyuk makes him dry the dishes as he eventually starts rinsing them of the soap. The quiet is kind of nice, Sanha guesses. There isn’t any pressure to say anything when Sanha is alone with Minhyuk.

“Is the giraffe supposed to be you?” Minhyuk asks. The question is so _normal_ that Sanha actually is taken aback.

“The giraffe.. Oh!” Sanha smiles. “On my shirt. I don’t know, I guess it could be?”

“It’s a nice shirt,” Minhyuk says, glancing at him. “Yellow is a nice color on you.”

Sanha blushes, as expected. He redirects his attention to drying out the cup in his hand. It’s bright pink, almost obnoxiously pink. “Myungjun picked this one out, didn’t he?”

Minhyuk looks at the cup, smiling. “Yeah, he did. How did you know?”

“Please,” Sanha says. “It’s kind of painfully obvious.”

Sanha likes the way that none of the cups or plates match. Everything has been pieced together, each item bringing it’s own story. Upon being asked, Minhyuk explains that the chip in one of the plastic cups is because Bin threw the cup across the room at Dongmin when Dongmin had first started living with them. The cup had hit the wall and made quite a loud noise. Jinwoo had come running into the room asking who got hurt, according to Minhyuk, while Myungjun could be heard laughing in the living room. Minhyuk had been standing two feet away from Bin when this had happened.

Sanha holds onto that thought. Each thing in these cabinets has a story to tell. Sanha wants to leave something behind, a memory of his own story. If he won’t be here, then his memory can be. “Do you have a marker?” Sanha asks. “Something that won’t wash off?”

Minhyuk gives him a funny look, but then realization settles in. “Yeah, I can go get it if you finish drying the dishes and put them away.”

Sanha nods, and Minhyuk leaves him alone. It isn’t hard to organize the mixed plates and cups. He finds it more troubling to get all of the silverware to fit in the drawer properly. A fork has to go with the spoons for the drawer to close. Sanha knows one of the others (probably Dongmin) will fix it later.

When Minhyuk returns, Sanha is sitting at the table, turning the yellow cup over in his hands. Minhyuk flops down in the chair beside him, holding out the marker. Sanha takes it, _accidentally_ brushing his fingers against Minhyuk’s. If the other boy notices the purposefulness in the action, he doesn’t comment on it. Sanha simply uncaps the marker and turns over the cup. His careful lines with the thin-tipped marker quickly turn into a basic drawing of the giraffe that Sanha constantly keeps looking at on his shirt. He colors in the spots and writes his name beneath the drawing in his best handwriting.

“There,” Sanha says. He sets the cup in front of them, smiling a little as he caps the marker.

“It’s nice,” Minhyuk comments.

A few moments of silence are all they get. Myungjun runs into the room, laughing loudly. “Guys, come—oh, that’s a cute giraffe—come out here. Jinwoo found this video, and he’s going to play it on the big projector. They’re a bunch of the home films that we put together a few months ago. He found the camera, too, and he wants to record today.”

“Already doing it.” Bin’s voice precedes his entry into the room with the camera. Sanha is a little lost in the midst of everything, but when Minhyuk grabs his hand and tugs him out of the room, Sanha doesn’t complain.

Sanha is squeezed in between Minhyuk and Dongmin as Jinwoo fiddles with the DVD player set on the table beneath the flat screen. He hasn’t seen any of them use the TV until now. Do they have cable, or is it just for DVDs?

This DVD, at least, doesn’t work like a regular DVD. The TV volume is so loud that when the film starts playing, Jinwoo yells and falls backwards, landing on the coffee table. Myungjun and Bin both move at the same time to pull him off the coffee table likely due to fear of it breaking under excess weight. Sanha laughs at the scene, and Minhyuk is laughing beside him. Their hands rest on the empty area between their legs as Jinwoo settles in beside Myungjun, leaving Bin a couch all to himself.

Though the volume gets adjusted, Sanha still finds the room noisy as they try to talk over each other and their past selves in the videos. He sees Minhyuk and Jinwoo moving a mattress on the flatscreen. Bin is yelling encouragements at them in the video. Sanha has never seen Jinwoo give a stink eye like that to any of them before. The scene changes, and Minhyuk is lying in his bed, a book over his face. Bin makes a point of shushing them all as they watch. The video is quiet, until Myungjun _screams_ in the video. There’s laughter from all of them (though most loudly from Bin) as they watch Minhyuk roll sideways off the bed, the book falling as Minhyuk holds a fighting stance. Sanha can barely see anything as Myungjun runs out of the room, camera rolling, though Minhyuk fills him in by saying he had chased Myungjun all the way up to the third floor of the house that day.

The amount of video content they have is ridiculous, and Sanha is too amused by all of it. He giggles, pushes his shoulder into Minhyuk’s, and has to use his free hand to wipe away tears when he’s begun to laugh too hard. 

Sanha gets distracted by Minhyuk a lot while watching. Though he shows up in the videos plenty, he’s also sitting right beside Sanha. His laugh makes Sanha look at him every time. He finds himself staring at Minhyuk (accidentally, of course), and he’s tuning out the room for a while before he comes back to himself. The room seems quieter, suddenly, and Sanha takes a look around. Bin is pointing the camera at their couch.

Sanha blushes, embarrassedly pulling his hand out of Minhyuk’s. Of course, Minhyuk looks at him suddenly, then he sees Bin. His hand outstretched, the camera flies into Minhyuk’s hand. Bin protests loudly and Dongmin is smiling beside Sanha. Minhyuk laughs, and the way his eyes shine in the low light of the room makes Sanha blush for a whole different reason. Instead of turning off the camera, though, Minhyuk faces it towards Jinwoo and Myungjun. Sanha covers his mouth, laughing as the two of them scramble apart from each other. He has forgotten, just for this time as they giggle and watch videos, that he isn’t going to remember any of it.

The loud dinging of an alarm on a phone is what brings them all back to reality. Jinwoo swears, tugging his phone out of his pocket as he silences the alarm. Dongmin grabs the remote from the coffee table and pauses the video, fittingly on a snapshot of the five of them smiling widely. Sanha feels his stomach sink.

“Fifteen minutes until the 24 hours are up,” Jinwoo says. It’s like all of the joy has been sucked out of the room right as he says it.

“Do you need to prepare a lot of stuff?” Myungjun asks, softly, and Jinwoo shakes his head.

“Just the normal stuff to turn the mirror into a communicator.” He stands up. “Dongmin, can you start preparing the room? I need to get Callah.”

Dongmin nods, and he’s the first to leave the room. The feeling in Sanha’s stomach is getting worse by the second. He reaches for Minhyuk’s hand blindly. Minhyuk’s fingers wrap around his, squeezing his hand. Sanha wants to thank him. He needs to thank him for everything good that he’s done. For being there when he was crying, for making Jinwoo let him see the fairies, for sharing his room. Sanha needs to thank Jinwoo for taking him in in the first place, and for doing everything he could. Bin needs to be thanked, too, for making Sanha feel more at ease with the situation by giving him a bag of iron powder when he shouldn’t have. He needs to thank Myungjun for making him feel at ease with the constant jokes and he needs to thank Dongmin for answer every question patiently. Sanha needs to thank Callah for showing him his memory that he had suppressed. Unfortunately, Sanha doesn’t have the time to do any of this.

Minhyuk is pulling him to his feet. Jinwoo is leading them, and Bin and Myungjun walk behind. Sanha doesn’t mean to drag his steps out, but he does, and he’s making Minhyuk walk slower as a result. His heart is pounding and he squeezes Minhyuk’s hand.

“I’m scared,” he whispers. “I’m really, _really_ scared, Minhyuk. I don’t want to do this. I know I have to, I know it’s the only way, but I really don’t want to.” He swallows thickly.

“I’m sorry,” Minhyuk utters. “I don’t want you to have to do this, either.”

“What if we just hide?” Sanha asks. “Can we just hide down here for the rest of forever?”

“Oberon could break the deal he has with humans if we try that,” Minhyuk says. “I’ve brought up every single scenario to Jinwoo. I can’t find a way out of this. I wish that—”

“Thank you.”

Minhyuk is caught off guard, but his steps don’t stop. He just looks up at Sanha. “Thanks? What are you thanking me for? I didn’t fix anything.”

Sanha rubs his eyes, bumping his glasses as he does. “I know, but before that. Last night, you made me feel better. And then before that, you took me outside to see the fairies. You didn’t protest when Jinwoo put me in your room. You didn’t get mad at me for calling you lazy on the first day. I peppered you with questions on that day we were here alone, and you answered all of them like it was nothing. I just, I really wanted to say thank you before I forget about all the nice things that you’ve done for me.”

Minhyuk stops outside the room. Myungjun and Bin have kept their distance, and they wait further down the hall. Sanha swallows, but he can’t make himself look at Minhyuk. He doesn’t have to force himself, though, because Minhyuk doesn’t ask him to. They’re silent for a short while. Minhyuk is the one to break the silence.

“I’m going to find you after this,” Minhyuk says. “I’m going to find you, and I’ll reintroduce you to everybody. I’ll tell you everything that happened. Even if you can’t remember me, um, any of us, I’ll still tell you everything.”

Sanha sniffs, holding back his tears. “Thank you,” he says weakly. “I don’t know if I’ll be the same person after this, though. If you don’t want me around, I’ll understand. I don’t know if I’ll even want to be around myself when things—”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

Lifting his gaze, he sees tears are gathered in Minhyuk’s eyes. Sanha takes in a shuddering breath. He wants to remember those eyes, and how nice Minhyuk—no, all of them—have been to him. The more time he wastes, the harder this is going to be.

“I am going to find you after this,” Minhyuk repeats. “I will, and I will bring you back to us. Okay? I promise, and I won’t break this one.”

Sanha lets out a noise half between a sob and a laugh. “Promise that you won’t break it?” Sanha says, a smile on his lips though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Then you have to keep your promise for sure.”

“I promise that I will keep my promise,” Minhyuk says, quite seriously. “I will keep my promise to find you and tell you everything.”

“Sanha!” Jinwoo says from inside the room. “Get in here. The rest of them can come in, too, for now. I don’t know what Oberon will say.”

Sanha takes the first step, walking into the room. The mirror looks like it did before, with the same symbols around it. He straightens his back to stand straighter. Callah and Dongmin are drawing with chalk on the floor with Jinwoo, and the circle is nearly finished. He thinks that Callah looks a little tired, but then again, they all do. Sanha squeezes Minhyuk’s hand, and Minhyuk squeezes back. Myungjun and Bin enter the room, too, the latter shutting the door. Sanha is distracted by Minhyuk tracing patterns on his hand with his fingertips, so he doesn’t realize that the chalk circle on the floor is already finished until Jinwoo is standing in the center of it again. He holds his breath as Jinwoo’s hands wave around, the green lines of light appearing just as they did the day before.

Nobody says a word, not even Jinwoo. The mirror rattles at the image shifts and Sanha is staring at Oberon. He feels Minhyuk’s hand tense in his own. Sanha runs his thumb over Minhyuk’s.

“Right on time,” Oberon says, his voice booming in the otherwise silent room.

“Let’s get this done,” Jinwoo says. He turns, glancing at Sanha. “Come over h—”

“You do not plan to keep my view limited to this circle, do you, Jinwoo?”

Jinwoo is facing away from Oberon, and he closes his eyes in exasperation. He walks to the edge of the circle, scraping the chalk away with the toe of his shoe. Oberon watches carefully, and the smile that comes across his face is nothing like a real smile should be. Sanha takes in a deep breath, holding it for a moment before he lets it out.

“The boy, Jinwoo.”

Sanha looks at Minhyuk, who smiles.

As he walks towards Jinwoo and the mirror, Sanha feels like his legs are dragging through water. He moves in slow motion. Jinwoo puts a hand on his back lightly when he’s standing beside him.

“Remove any spellwork you’ve done on the boy,” Oberon demands. “I need to see this done in front of me so that I know you are not trying any tricks.”

Jinwoo walks and stands in front of Sanha, waving his hands. Sanha watches as green lines hover through the air, connecting with him in different places. After a moment, Jinwoo drops his hands and turns around to face Oberon again. “Good enough?”

“Yes,” Oberon says. “But the rest of them, they need to leave.”

“No,” Jinwoo says. “First, you’re going to repeat your promise.”

Oberon rolls his eyes. “I promise that once the spell has been done, I will call off my fairies. I promise that no harm will come to Sanha, Jinwoo and his accomplices, Callah, or any innocent bystanders for as long as I live.”

Jinwoo nods. He turns, but Sanha doesn’t. He can’t look back at them. Sanha keeps his eyes fixated on Oberon, because if he looks at the others now, he’ll start crying again. Even so, his heart pounds as he hears footsteps leave the room.

“I’m really thankful,” Sanha says, suddenly turning around to face them. He wipes his eyes, talking even though his voice shakes. “I’m really thankful for everything you all have done for me. You didn’t have to do any of this, but you did, and even though I won’t remember it, I’ll always be thankful.”

The look on their faces is enough. None of them say anything. Sanha turns around, facing the mirror again. Jinwoo pats his back and they wait until the door has closed, leaving them alone with Oberon and the mirror.

******

Minhyuk is the last one out of the room. He moved as he closed the door, shrinking his field of vision until he absolutely can’t see Sanha anymore. With the door now shut, he leans his forehead against the wall, hand still on the doorknob. Dongmin stops following the others down the hall.

“Minhyuk, come on,” Dongmin says, his voice as gentle as ever. “We should leave.”

“I promised him,” Minhyuk says, though he doesn’t look at Dongmin. His voice shakes when he speaks. “I promised him that he would be alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey~o! If you're enjoying this fic and want to help me in naming the series that it will belong to, you should take a look at [this post](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/post/162442775216/wings-n-things-series-name) and then leave a comment telling me which one you like best!
> 
> I'm also always available to chat on my blog [here](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/) so come yell at me.


	15. Epilogue

They sit on the couches in silence. Jinwoo should be bringing Sanha through here any moment to pick up his guitar, then he’ll take him home. He’s going to have to get rid of these memories before he gets home, too. As the five of them—Callah, Myungjun, Bin, Dongmin, and Minhyuk—dwell on these thoughts, they hear footsteps. Jinwoo is finally leading Sanha over. It’s done.

“He’s really gone,” Minhyuk whispers. Bin places a hand on his back, comforting his oldest friend.

Dongmin looks up when Jinwoo enters the room and notices that he almost looks _happy_. Jinwoo sighs, turning and looking down the hall again.

“Sanha! Hurry up! Honestly, how slow can you be?”

Jinwoo’s words are enough rouse the others. Minhyuk actually stands up because those words sound too friendly, too familiar. He sits back down when he thinks for a moment. There was no way out of it. Jinwoo told him that numerous times, and the others had all done the same in the time since that door had closed, leaving Jinwoo and Sanha alone in the room with Oberon. Minhyuk presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, resting his elbows on his knees as he leans forward.

Sanha walks into the room, standing tall. His brows pull together, and then a goofy smile appears on his face. “Did you guys miss me?”

All of them are staring at him, Jinwoo included. Jinwoo, however, isn’t looking at Sanha with the same look of confusion that the others are. Sanha glances at Jinwoo then looks at the others.

“Oh!” Sanha exclaims. “We didn’t tell you, that’s right. My brain is still kind of fuzzy.”

“Tell us _what_?” Bin asks, his words coming slowly. “What’s going on here?”

Jinwoo looks at Sanha, and the smile that comes across both of them is goofy. It doesn’t fit the situation in the slightest bit. Jinwoo elbows Sanha. “You tell them, since you _remember_.”

Sanha nods. He straightens up and fixes his expression, the earlier somber mood returning. It lasts for a mere moment as Sanha changes, speaking in a happy tone.

“We tricked him.”

“Tricked him?” Myungjun asks, his loud voice ringing. “ _Him_ as in Oberon?”

Sanha nods once.

“That’s not possible,” Dongmin says. There’s a look of awe on his face. “Neither of you could have lied to him. Callah didn’t—”

“Except she did,” Jinwoo says. “Before, when I said I had to go get Callah, that’s when—”

Minhyuk has gotten to his feet, causing Jinwoo to stop talking. He moves slowly, his eyes glued to Sanha. It’s obvious that Sanha is trying to keep his expression under control, but the smile keeps peeking out anyway. Minhyuk stops a foot away from Sanha, looking up at him.

Sanha _smiles_. It lights up his whole face. “You kept your promise,” Sanha says.

Minhyuk’s arms are around Sanha’s waist before he says anything. His face is pressed into Sanha’s collar. The sudden contact catches Sanha off guard. A moment later, his arms are wrapped around Minhyuk, his head bowed as he hugs Minhyuk back.

This simple action is enough to cause noise from all of the other boys. Myungjun is the first one to make it across the room, latching onto the hug. Jinwoo joins right after. He grabs Myungjun’s hands and they wrap their arms all the way around Minhyuk and Sanha. When Dongmin comes close enough and ruffles Sanha’s hair, Sanha laughs. Bin is even in on this group hug, squeezing the whole of them tightly. Sanha shrieks at the tight circle around him.

“I can’t breathe!” he shouts. “I’m suffocating! I kept my memories, but the rest of you are going to _kill_ me!”

Laughter fills the space. They detach themselves from Sanha, who breathes over-exaggeratedly. Minhyuk hasn’t fully let go of him, a hand still on Sanha’s waist. Sanha puts his hand over Minhyuk’s and winds their fingers together. With their hands joined, they walk to the couches. Jinwoo sits in the center of the couch against the wall, Myungjun to one side of him and Callah on the other. Bin and Dongmin are sitting on the couch with the wooden arms, Dongmin is in the place where Sanha is used to sitting. So instead, Sanha pulls Minhyuk to the third couch, the one with the flowery pattern. Minhyuk sits so close that their thighs are touching, almost flush with one another’s.

“How did you do it?” Dongmin asks. “You said something about Callah?”

“Do you remember how I said I needed Sanha for something?” Jinwoo says. “And immediately, Sanha said that he had an idea? This was all his idea. I don’t know how he came up with it.”

“What did you do?” Myungjun asks, looking between Jinwoo and Sanha. “How did you pull it off?”

“Well, after we were done talking to Oberon, Jinwoo put this memory spell on me,” Sanha says. “It would make me forget that I had ever brought up the idea to Jinwoo. And then last night, when I went to that room with Jinwoo after Minhyuk brought me over, Jinwoo took it off and replaced it with a stronger spell. It was really complex and it took a while, so that’s why we were in there for so long. The small one only worked for a little while, but the big one lasted through just a few minutes ago when Jinwoo took it off.”

“What about when Oberon made you remove all the spells on him?” Bin asks. “Wouldn’t that have removed all of it?”

Jinwoo shakes his head. “The more complex the spell, the harder it is to remove. I did a basic spell to just show Oberon that there were no enchantments on Sanha.”

“And Oberon couldn’t tell which spell it was,” Dongmin says. “He can see the magic being done, but since the mirror was set up like it was, he couldn’t feel the magic energy.”

“Bingo.” Jinwoo looks proud of himself.

“Wouldn’t Oberon have asked Sanha questions after you did the spell in front of him, though?” Minhyuk barely looks at Jinwoo, his eyes on Sanha. “The one that was supposed to remove all his memories?”

“Jinwoo had to do a lot of work,” Sanha says. “He did a memory spell that removed that first memory I had of the fairies, but since he didn’t remove the others, I’m still Fairy Touched. He did some weird thing that made the spell look like a full memory-erasing spell. It was just that one memory, though, and he put a wall on the others.”

“A lock,” Jinwoo clarifies, and Dongmin lets out an _ah_.

“Then Oberon asked me some questions,” Sanha continues. “He asked my name, and when I was born. It was weird, because I really couldn’t remember any of it. I knew who I was but I didn’t know my name or anything about myself.”

“When Oberon was satisfied, I made him call off the fairies. They’re probably all gone now, because I watched as he called them. And he promised, so he can’t break his promise anyway.”

“What happens if he does?” Sanha asks.

There’s a snort of amusement from Bin. “Bye bye, Fairy Boy,” Bin says, making Jinwoo smirk and Dongmin shoves him lightly.

“Wait, he’ll really die if he breaks the promise?” Sanha looks from Jinwoo to Dongmin to Minhyuk. “So this is basically foolproof!”

Minhyuk bumps his shoulder against Sanha. “So that’s it?” Minhyuk asks. “A bunch of complex spell work? Jinwoo, what about lying to Oberon?”

“When I went to get Callah from her room earlier, I had her do the spell then. I knew the spell would take a lot out of her, then she would have to do it on herself, too, since she knew about this all.” Jinwoo nods a little. “We would have told you, but I knew that Callah couldn’t do that for everybody.”

“I wanted to,” Callah says. “If I could, I would have. I hated having to see you all suffer while you thought that Sanha was going to lose his memories.”

“But instead he only lost the one memory,” Dongmin says. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. Am I sleeping?”

There’s laughter filling the room again. “I really didn’t know about the plan, either,” Sanha says. “Not until after Jinwoo removed all the spells on me once Oberon was gone. I was so shocked when he took off the spells.”

“Oh, whatever,” Bin scoffs.

“No, really!” Sanha protests, earning a laugh from the other. “I had no idea. Jinwoo says the memory spell had to be really strong so that my magic—um, what’s it called—oh, immunity! The spell had to be strong so my magic immunity couldn’t destroy it. Because then Oberon would’ve known _I_ was lying.”

Dongmin asks a question at the same time as Myungjun, and Bin raises his voice to get them to be quiet. Jinwoo starts talking as Myungjun repeats himself. Sanha tunes out the familiar noise and glances at Minhyuk, smiling a little. He can remember everything. Every detail is there. He can recall every smile, every gentle touch, and every happy moment with Minhyuk at his side.

Minhyuk must feel him staring, because he looks up at Sanha. A smile shows on his face. It quickly grows into a full grin with teeth shining. Sanha squeezes Minhyuk’s hand, earning a squeeze to his own hand in return. When Minhyuk leans his head onto Sanha’s shoulder, Sanha just lies his own head on top of the dyed red hair.

******

Sanha rolls over in his bed after turning off his alarm, squinting at the sunlight pouring in through his window. His mother is making breakfast, and he knows she is because he can smell the bacon. Sanha rolls in the opposite direction. With his back facing the window, he grabs his phone from his bedside table. He knocks off the pencil he had left beside it from doing his homework into the early hours of the morning.

 **Minhyukkie** _1:42 AM_  
_Bin snores so loud, they left their bedroom door open and so did I but I don’t want to get up_

 **Minhyukkie** _1:49 AM_  
_Sanha?_

 **Minhyukkie** _1:54 AM_  
_I guess you fell asleep. Sleep well!!! I’ll see you tomorrow_

Sanha smiles at the text messages he missed. As he reads over them once, twice, three times, he gets another text. Ignoring the notifications from Twitter and his other friends, his smile grows to twice the size it had been.

 **Minhyukkie** _7:03 AM_  
_You’re probably awake, right? Jinwoo wanted me to remind you that he’ll pick you up after your guitar lesson (which should be fairy-less, this time)_

Sanha giggles, covering his mouth. There’s a knock on his bedroom door. A panicked feeling rushes into Sanha for no real reason. He feels, for some reason, that he’s been caught flirting with Minhyuk in person.

“Sanha?” his dad calls. “Are you awake, son?”

“Yeah, Dad!” Sanha yells back. “I just woke up. I’ll be out for breakfast in a minute.”

“Okay. You have time, so don’t rush too much.”

Sanha listens to the sounds of his dad’s footsteps leave. As he does, his phone dings in his hand again. Sanha lifts his phone immediately, heat rising to his cheeks as he reads the newest message.

 **Minhyukkie** _7:04 AM_  
_Can’t wait to see you!!_

He sits up, typing a quick reply of the thumbs up emoji and a blushing emoji. His clothes are stacked on his desk, ready to be changed into. Sanha pushes his guitar case out of the way with his foot as he passes it. From one side of the room to the other, he gathers the things he needs for school and the things he’ll need for his meeting with Minhyuk and his new friends after his guitar lesson.

Sanha chats with his parents at breakfast, bouncing his legs as he eats. For the first time in a while, he’s eager to get to school. Even with the tough homework he knows he’s going to be assigned and the way that he’ll barely get to speak to his friends, Sanha is excited for school because he has plans for after. He has plans to see his new friends. Dongmin had promised to bring the best books about magic so Sanha could read through them when he had time. Bin won’t be able to show up, since he’s a vampire and all, but Myungjun is going to stay home to keep him company. Best of all, he’ll get to see Minhyuk. Sanha doesn’t enjoy high school, but he thinks that after the things he has experienced in the last few days—who is he trying to kid? School is awful, but it’s worth going if he gets to even glimpse the world he now knows is hiding around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!!! I really hope you enjoyed this fic. As always, you can contact me on my tumblr [here](http://snibnoom.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk!
> 
> I love getting comments and replying to them, so leave a comment below and let me know what you thought of this fic! Did you have any questions that weren't answered? Leave it all down there, and I will reply!!


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